


All Arise!

by shellfishDimes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Act Six, Alpha Timeline, Alternate Universe - Canon, Amputation, Angst, Body Horror, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/F, F/M, Fan Soundtracks, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Future Fic, God Tier, Gore, M/M, Multi, OT4, Polyamory, Possession, Quadrant Vacillation, SBURB, Subjugglators
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-15
Updated: 2012-09-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 17:01:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 52,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellfishDimes/pseuds/shellfishDimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>We are all the children of light and the children of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch. We are to be watchmen in these end-times.</i> — Missy Elliott</p>
<p>Everyone thinks Her Imperious Condescension is the final boss. This is the story about how wrong they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Children of Light

**Author's Note:**

> This story comes with an accompanying [music mix](http://8tracks.com/shellfishdimes/all-arise-an-alpha-kids-fanmix), best enjoyed alongside it for a wholesome reading experience. I started writing this around [Act 6 Act 2](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006320), pages and pages before we knew 80% of the things we know now, including the identities of uu and UU.
> 
> Thanks to my beta [messageredacted](http://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted) for her tireless and dedicated work on this. Good friend, best proofreader.
> 
> **Warnings for the entire work:** body horror, eye trauma, amputation, blood, gore.

Everyone thinks Her Imperious Condescension is the final boss.

Dirk makes sure that they are all god tier by the time they reach her.

Jane is the first to ascend. Roxy kills her while she's sleeping on her quest bed. It takes a lot of hesitation and she nearly walks away, but then Dirk reminds her that they need a god tier Hero of Life or else they won't stand a very good chance in the very last push of the game. No amount of fraymotifs will get them past everything that the Condesce had to throw at them.

Roxy breaks Jane's neck, and there's a soul-crushing couple of minutes in which Dirk thinks that he's got it wrong, that this was not how the game was supposed to work, but then Jane is floating above her quest bed and a crying Roxy, in her god tier dress and with a buck-toothed grin on her face, and Dirk feels an enormous weight lift off his chest.

Roxy punches him afterwards, anyway.

She goes next, and this time they know what they're doing and it's a much cleaner job, but it still makes Dirk's throat constrict as Jake shoots her in the chest. She gurgles for a second and they watch blood pour out from between her teeth when she grins and collapses on the quest bed.

He's immensely proud of Jake, who pulls his pistols on one of his best friends without even flinching. All those months of training have really paid off. Jake kills like it's an art, with precision, determination and without any kind of remorse. Dirk is convinced that he is their greatest weapon, and he's saving his ascension to god tier for last.

Dirk slits his own throat. It doesn't hurt as much as he'd expected it to: the sword is too sharp for that, so it simply whispers against his neck. He turns his back to the others, both because he doesn't think they'd want to watch this, and because he wants to avoid the blood from his jugular spurting on them. It would just be too messy.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: Nice tights.  
TT: Your Highness.  
TT: Thanks. I like the way they bring out my legs.  
TT: What do you want? Kind of busy here.  
TT: It's about Jake.  
TT: I've been making some calculations.  
TT: I don't think getting him to god tier is a good idea.  
TT: Why?  
TT: I have been running scenario tests to see how the final boss battle will play out.  
TT: With the data I now have, there are better odds that you will win if he doesn't go to god tier.  
TT: Bro, I don't have time to go into what kind of numbers you have been crunching, but surely it hasn't failed to escape your attention that if Jake doesn't ascend to god tier, he will die.  
TT: Maybe that's the better option.   
TT: What the fuck.  
TT: You have spent all this time thinking that Jane was the one you had to worry about. That she would be susceptible to the Batterwitch's influence the most, since she is her heiress. And you have been keeping her under the radar and away from the action so that she doesn't get too exposed too soon.   
TT: Get to the point.  
TT: You have neglected to think about Jake.  
TT: Or, to put it differently: you have been thinking about Jake too much, and let your emotions win against your better judgement.  
TT: I am an AI and I do not have that problem, so I will tell you again.  
TT: All my calculations point to an unfavourable outcome should he ascend.  
TT: Don't let Jake go to god tier.  
TT: Look. I have no time for this Pythian babbling.  
TT: We can't beat the Batterwitch unless we have four god tier players. We can't have four god tier players unless I get Jake to godhood.  
TT: Unless I get Jake to godhood, he will die, and so will everyone else, because we can't beat the Batterwitch without four god tier players.  
TT: Do you see the extremely fuckin' obvious point I'm making here.  
TT: Fine. But don't say I didn't warn you. 

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT]  \--

They careen through the sky on Jake's planet. The wind howls in Dirk's ears, the cold air bites against his cheeks, and his friends are on either side of him. It's better than being on Derse, because Roxy is awake now, and Jane is here, and Jake is riding piggy-back on Dirk, his arms and legs locked tightly around him. Roxy didn't want to walk when she could fly, and there was no negotiating this. Jake was hesitant to be carried around like a kid at first, but he quietened his protests when they assured him that it was only going to be until they found his quest bed.

They've been looking for it for hours now, and there hasn't been a sign of Jake's quest bed anywhere. Dirk's shoulders are starting to hurt from holding onto him, and although at first the feeling of Jake's warmth against his back was nice, he feels himself starting to sweat under the strain. It is a sobering thought that godhood didn't get rid of base, annoying human stuff such as sweating, or having a debilitating crush on your best friend and enjoying the fact that despite being a ruthless killing machine, he still holds on tighter and whoops in his ear when Dirk does a somersault in mid-air.

Dirk's knees shake when he finally lands at the quest bed. They're all tired: Roxy's eyes keep falling closed, and Jane is leaning onto her, yawning heavily. Dirk feels like he could crawl onto that stone slab, curl up and sleep forever, but he knows that there isn't any time. According to Dirk's intelligence, the BAT Condescension is fast approaching the planet, and will soon be in orbit.

Jake's arms unwind from around him, and Dirk cracks his painful neck.

"Ready when you are, Strider!" he says cheerfully, hopping onto the bed. Hands on his hips and grinning, he faces death as Dirk silently draws his sword.

He sneaks a look at Jane and Roxy. All of a sudden, this feels far too public a spectacle for him to be entirely comfortable with it. He wants to tell them to turn around, or to go away, but that's no way to treat friends who have followed him and trusted him this far. He can't tell them to fuck off just because he thinks that killing Jake with them there would make him feel embarrassed and exposed. He hesitates as red text flashes across his shades.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: Bro, listen to me.  
TT: You can still back out.  
TT: Don't do it.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT]  blocked timaeusTestified [TT]  \--

The chat client blinks off. He's not a teenager any more: he is a god, and he will fucking act like one.

Dirk gives Jake a look over his shades and grins at him.

"See you on the other side, English," he says, and runs him through with the blade.

Even though he's seen it twice now, watching someone rise to godhood is never not frighteningly mesmerising. The totems of Jake's planet are dragonflies, and they watch as a swarm of them flies around Jake's body and envelops him whole. The first time they saw this, it was on Jane's planet with monarch butterflies, and it was frightening as all hell. They didn't know what was coming, and all of a sudden there were all these butterflies that appeared to be feeding on their friend's body.

The dragonflies dissipate, and Jake's body flies up into the air above the quest bed. The blood drips out of his wound and onto the stone. Dirk hears Jane stop mid-yawn as all three of them are engulfed in blinding light – when the light dims, there's Jake in his stupid cream-coloured pyjamas, hood up and glasses flashing with the last aftermath of the fading light. He bends down to grab the tips of his blue boots and does a somersault in the air.

"My word," he says, righting himself and floating down next to them, "that is no more pleasant than when you did it to me, Strider."

"Stop being such a show-off," laughs Roxy. The tiredness seems to have seeped out of everyone, for now. "Are we ready to kick that Batterwitch and her lackeys into next week?"

"Darn right we are!" beams Jake, and shoots off into the sky. Jane follows swiftly, and Roxy grabs Dirk's hand, pulling him along.

They fly.

  


* * *

  


Four kids against the flagship of the troll empire was never a battle which promised a positive outcome. They had planned it in detail. Both Jake and Dirk were experts at fighting and Jane turned out to be great at strategising, and together with the help of the auto responder's scenario testing feature and Roxy's knack for stealth, they had a perfect battle plan laid out.

What they hadn't taken into account, however, that the BAT _Condescension_ was a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, and every single one of them was filled with carapace and hordes of Threshecutioners, Ruffiannihilators and Cavalreapers.

They don't even know what Cavalreapers are until they are ambushed by a scout party of them, and one stabs Roxy through the spine with what looks like a jousting lance.

The battle breaks out around her limp form, and they fought like they've never fought before. Jane's double-ended trident makes the leader of the Cavalreapers pause for a moment, and it is enough for her to lop his head off. Blue troll blood sprays his comrades in a long, bright arc, and they don't hesitate again.

They fight until all the Cavalreapers lie slain around their feet and Dirk's sword is dripping wet with the rainbow of their blood. Jane sniffs heavily, fighting not to cry, and Dirk puts an arm around her to try and offer comfort even as he is struggling to hold back tears himself. Jake just looks numb, hands shaking even as he holds a tight grip on his pistols.

That's why they all nearly get a heart attack when Roxy sits up, rubs her stomach and says: "Jeez, that was rude."

"What the actual fuck, Lalonde!" shouts Dirk as Jane swoops down on her, pulling her into a hug. She chuckles.

"Oh, did I not tell you about how gods can't be killed?"

After she explains about uranianUmbra disclosing that god tier players could only be killed for good if their death was either heroic or just, Dirk kicks her in the shin.

They move on through the corridors, looking for the heart of the ship where they know that the Condesce will be. After the first battle, the following ones come faster, but they find it easier to deal with them, since now there is less of a concern that death will permanently stop them. Roxy jumps into the air and youth rolls over the heads of the dumbfounded carapace, and Jane zigzags through them, trident a red blur as she pokes and slices. Sometimes Dirk and Jake don't have to do much more than hang back and look out for a new wave and attackers while Roxy and Jane fight.

Threshecutioners turn out to be trickier to kill. They're silent, and they're fast. They use sickles so they aren't as encumbered by their weapon as the Cavalreapers. At first, Dirk thinks nothing of it, because what use could a garden tool be against four gods? He changes his mind when a sickle nicks Jane's arm, leaving a deep gash in its wake. He flash steps to her side in an instant and swings his sword, cutting off the offending Threshecutioner's arm, and then stabbing him in the chest. When he falls to the ground, he doesn't get up again. They don't take them lightly after that.

They keep on fighting and advancing deeper into the ship, but there is still no sign of Jack Noir. There's plenty of other Dersite agents which Roxy and Dirk deal with, letting Jane sit those battles out while Jake tends to her injured arm, but not one of them has a spade painted on his left breast; not one of them is the Arch-Agent, and their drive is starting to falter. Exhaustion creeps back into their bones.

"We've been fighting these ruffians for a long time now, but we are still not advancing at a good pace," says Jake, in the hush between two battles. They're walking along a corridor illuminated with a pulsating, indigo light. It seems to be deserted for the time being, but Dirk keeps all his senses focused on looking for Threshecutions lurking in the shadows. "I suggest that we do something more concrete about it."

"Troll hierarchy is blood-based and goes from maroon to tyrian," says Jane. "We've been on decks with jade, turquoise, cerulean, and blue light. And now we're on an indigo deck, which means that the deeper we go into the ship, the higher we climb up the hemospectrum." She pauses thoughtfully, wiping one of the ends of her trident on the hem of her dress. "If we think about that, then there should be one more deck between us and the Empress."

"It would have taken us less time on the cerulean deck if Jake hadn't insisted on getting captivated by those girl Ruffiannihilators," Roxy giggles, and Jane hoots with laughter. Even Dirk cracks a grin when he sees Jake looking obviously flustered, fumbling with his glasses and pushing them further up his nose.

"Jane, that's not fair!" he says. "I was simply admiring their... oh gods, now's not the time! What I was saying," he continues, "maybe we could utilise some of our heroic powers to get us ahead in the game."

"How is that different from what we've been doing so far?" asks Dirk.

"Well..." Jake begins, and it's obvious that he's very uncomfortable with what he's about to say. "Mayhap we could use them a little _more_." He gives Dirk a wide smile, clearly meant to win him over to his side.

"Jake English!" exclaims Jane, shocked. "You're not suggesting we _cheat,_ are you?"

"I simply don't see the point of going on like this," Jake tries to explain. "We've climbed to the top of our echeladders, we all have our ultimate weapons - for heaven's sake, we are gods, and we're still fighting like we're on the very first level. We could get to the Batterwitch much faster if we just … showed a bit more gumption!"

Jane crosses her arms across her chest, visibly annoyed. "I cannot believe you're considering tricking the game," she says.

"He's kind of right," Roxy cuts in. "It would save us the trouble of fighting a whole lot of unimportant enemies. They're just here to distract us, anyway. And maybe we could make it so we don't even have to fight Jack Noir."

"And go straight to the Empress?" Even this far into the game, Jane still hesitates in calling her _Batterwitch_ or _the Condesce,_ it's always _the Empress_. She has no problems with killing someone who has tried to manipulate her mind and control her entire life, but she won't use any pejoratives, or anything other than her title when referring to her. "How wise is that, Roxy? We haven't fought nearly enough to face her."

"So you'd rather wear yourself out clobbering some useless carapace to death rather than get to the real thing?" Roxy groans, dragging a hand over her face. "After all we've been through, Janey, you can still be _such_ a tightass."

"I'm not–"

"Tightaaaass."

"I'm just–"

"Tightass!"

" _Cut it out!_ " Jake growls, and the sound is so unexpected and sudden coming from him that Roxy instantly stops mocking Jane, surprised into silence. Jake looks like he can't quite believe what he's said, and he quickly tries to backpedal. "Gosh, sorry, don't know where that came from," he says, chuckling hollowly. "Thank you. Um, now that the bickering has ceased, I meant to ask..." He turns to Dirk. "What do you think we should do, Strider?" There is such expectation and eagerness for getting approval from Dirk on his face that Dirk feels like his insides have started to glow.

"Yes, a democratic vote is what we need," agrees Jane, and she looks hopefully at Dirk. She's expecting him to agree with her. Although he favours the thoughtful approach, Dirk can't deny that they have been losing a lot of time and stamina fighting off the Condesce's unending swarm of devoted troops and carapace, time and stamina they could have saved for the final battle, and now they don't even have anywhere to rest before they face her. Impressed with Jake's forcefulness as he is, he can't deny that the idea of jumping the gun this late in the game would be immensely risky, and could prove to be catastrophic for their chances of victory.

He is about to answer, when Roxy tenses, holding her rifle at the ready. "What's that noise?" she hisses. Dirk strains his ears, but can't hear anything – and then it's too late.

They seem to appear out of the walls, like they've been melded with the shadows. They're the biggest trolls Dirk has yet seen: they are nearing seven feet, their height made even more formidable with their oryx-like horns twisting up from the grizzly manes of their hair. They are armed with what look like juggling clubs, one in each hand – if, that is, juggling clubs were the width of Dirk's thigh.

"Maybe keep your motherfucking voice down next time you are trying to sneak up on someone, little sister," one of them snarls, and Dirk is met with a face covered in white greasepaint, styled as to resemble an animal skull. In normal light, it would look ridiculous: in the pulsating, indigo light they are under, however, it looks like real bone, and it sends a shiver down Dirk's spine.

"Thank the mirthful messiahs we found you," the troll says, and chuckles. It's a sound as far removed from happiness as a death rattle. "With their help, your mutant blood will paint the wicked pictures worthy of our master's gaze."

They raise their clubs.

Roxy's gun buzzes as it charges up. Dirk's sword scrapes against the floor before he raises it and holds it above his head. Behind him, he can feel Jane's back leaning against his: she must be pointing her trident at the other troll.

Jake raises his pistols, grinning. His teeth shine eerily in the indigo light, standing out against his dark skin. He faces the tallest troll. It's a terrifying sight: she dwarfs him, dark, wild and bloodthirsty, and he looks laughably fragile next to her, in his cream pyjamas and dorky glasses.

The trolls bring their clubs down.

For their size, they are surprisingly agile and fast, and it takes up all of Dirk's concentration to dodge the first couple of blows. One of them connects with his shin, and he feels the bone shatter under the strength of the impact. He spins around, ducking down away from the big troll's reach. He crouches on his good leg, swiping his sword across the troll's Achilles' tendons. Blood gushes out of the twin wounds, and with an agonising growl, his troll collapses to the ground like a felled tree.

Dirk jumps into the air, letting his powers carry him the rest of the way, and lands on the prostrate troll's back, stumbling and nearly falling when his legs fail to catch him. Pain sears through his injured leg and he bites down hard on his lower lip, struggling to ignore it. He grabs a long, wavy horn and pulls the troll's head up with it. He drags his sword across the troll's throat, and indigo blood flows out of the wound. With disgust, Dirk lets go of the horn, and the dead troll's head falls on its face with a crunch.

Jane's shout makes him look up.

Both Roxy and Jane have managed to kill their trolls, but Jake is still fighting the female, and it doesn't look good. There is blood down Jake's face and the left lens of his glasses is smashed. The troll isn't entirely unharmed: her shoulder appears to have been blasted off by Jake's guns, and both her clubs lie on the floor by her side.

She is using only one hand to hold Jake up by the throat. His legs are kicking uselessly as she raises him further up, her mouth a snarling grin. Dirk raises his sword again, ready to attack her, but he's too slow.

With a grin, Jake grabs her hand and pulls her fingers apart with the crunching of knuckles. She growls in surprise as he breaks her fingers, and rises up, floating above her head. Confused, she tilts her face up and he steps on it, with one boot on her nose and the other on her chin. The grin never leaving his face, he braces his feet, and kicks. There is a sickening noise as her jaw breaks, and Jake whips out his pistols. He twirls them in his fingers, and then he raises his head and _winks_ at Dirk, giving him that rakish grin that would make Dirk weak at the knees even if one of his shinbones wasn't entirely shattered. The troll's arm flails in the air to try and grab at Jake, but he's quicker: with a snap of his head, he looks back down, and fires a barrage of shots down her throat.

She drops to the floor, dead, and Jake lands gracefully next to her, pistols still smoking.

For a couple of moments, there is nothing but silence, and then Roxy whoops and starts clapping, and soon Jake is looking sheepish and waving off her and Jane's compliments.

"I couldn't be such an expert at brawling and fisticuffs if it wasn't for my best friend," Jake beams at Dirk, clapping a hand on his shoulder. Dirk looks at the dead female, her jaw gaping open grotesquely and the greasepaint on her face caked with her blood, and feels nauseated.

"That troll mentioned their master," says Dirk, pointing at the troll's corpse with his sword, eager to change the subject. Jake's hand doesn't leave his shoulder.

"Maybe he meant the Condesce?" says Roxy. She is sitting on the floor, breathing heavily, while Jane does the Lifey thing to mend Roxy's broken arm. Not for the first time, Dirk is grateful for the fact that they have a Maid of Life on their team to keep fixing their most severe wounds. He still can't support himself fully on his newly-healed shinbone, but without Jane's help, he wouldn't even be able to put weight on his injured leg in the slightest.

"I don't think he meant the Condesce," he says.

"He can't have meant – ouch, Janey, that was a bit too much to the left – he can't have meant Jack?" Roxy pants out, flinching from Jane's touch. "A carapace can't be in charge of trolls."

"He didn't mean Jack," says Jake. He sounds distracted. Dirk looks at his face, and sees that Jake is looking somewhere beyond where they are standing, further down the corridor. He follows his gaze, but there's nothing there.

"Let's just keep moving," says Dirk, ducking away from Jake's grip and hobbling past the troll corpses.

  


* * *

  


\-- tipsyGnostalgic [TG] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TG: dirk could u tell ur shades to stop pestering me its kinda distractin  
TG: he keeps on talking about jake and doing the whole DOOOOOOOOM thing and im not comfortable w/ it  
TT: Lalonde, I'm walking right next to you. Is there a reason why you've chosen this particular mode of annoying me rather than saying it to my face?   
TG: i just dont want jake to hear thats all  
TG: dont wanna hurt his feelings  
TG: and to be honest hes getting kinda creepy  
TG: i mean did u see the way he killed that troll that was INTENSE  
TT: What has the AR been telling you?   
TG: stuff like  
TG: oh roxy jake should never have reached god tier  
TG: youve all made a horrible mistake  
TG: hes gonna get outta hand and youll all lose the game  
TG: (btw i just lost the game)  
TT: I am not going to indulge you by continuing that meme.   
TG: im just tryna have a bit of fun in this extrmemey stressful situation ok JEEZ  
TT: Going back to what we were talking about.  
TT: I don't think AR is right. He keeps pressing the issue, but it sounds extremely implausible.  
TT: I care about Jake a lot, and I have invested a lot of time in making him the best he can be. He's very grateful, and he isn't going to jeopardise our friendship, or our lives.  
TT: Because he's Jake, and he couldn't live with himself if he did. He's too good a person.  
TG: u like him  
TG: u loooooooove him  
TG: u want to kiss him on the moooooooouth  
TT: That's beside the point.   
TG: ololol

Dirk looks up from his phone at Roxy. She raises her eyebrows at him.

Being a god, they had learned, did not involve never getting tired. Being a god was pretty much the same as being a teenager, except you were immortal and you could fly. But you still got tired, you still got hurt, and you were still hungry.

"I think we should find somewhere to rest," he says. "As good a job as Jane's been doing, I don't think anyone's really fit to continue for much longer. If we hack into the surveillance camera system, we can break into one of the cabins and gather our strength there."

"I can do that," says Roxy. "The good thing is, nobody's going to follow us since we've pretty much killed everyone who tried."

A few corridors down, Roxy finds a set of switches and wires connecting to a tiny screen behind a panel in the wall. They wait anxiously, darting glances on either side of the corridor as she fiddles with it. Dirk has no idea how she can even read the writing, but it's less than fifteen minutes until she springs back from the panel in triumph.

"I've disabled the cameras in this one, and the two corridors to our left," she says. "What I've done is recorded the feed of the empty corridor and then I overrode the–" Jane interrupts her with a huge yawn, and then hoots with laughter when Roxy's face falls.

"I'm really sorry, Roxy!" she says. "I'm just so tired, I can't help it! Let's find somewhere safe to nap for a bit and then you can tell me all about it."

They go into the corridor to their left, and find the walls lined with doors. Roxy picks one of the ones on the right-hand side, and after some fiddling with the door mechanism, the doors slide open and let them into an officer's quarters. Roxy makes sure that the door is locked shut behind them, so they don't get any nasty surprises.

"What the dickens is _that?_ " says Jake, pointing to the contraption at the bottom of the cabin. To Dirk, it looks like a closed-top bathtub full of green slime. There are two doors in the cabin, one leading to the left, and the other to the right. Roxy takes the door on the right, rifle raised in preparation for potential stealthy enemies.

"There's another one of those in here," she says. "Do they sleep in this stuff?"

"You mean there isn't a bed?" Jane's face falls.

"There's a pile of pillows in a corner," Roxy calls from the other room. "Dibs on that!"

Dirk taps the little keyboard next to the door on the left, and it slides open to reveal a perfectly suitable bathroom with a sink, shower, toilet, and an inexplicable poster of what looks like _Say Anything,_ except John Cusack appears to be a troll and the part of the poster which isn't taken up by him is full of troll writing. He doesn't catch any other details, because Jane elbows past him.

"Sorry, Dirk!" she says. "I've been aching for a good, long shower since we left LOCAH." She gives him one last grin before the door slides shut.

"Looks like you're taking first watch, Dirk!" shouts Roxy. "These pillows are just too comfortable to get up from!" Dirk's phone buzzes.

TG: be sure to smooch him on the mouth before jane gets out of the shower or u may get sucked into her tight ass!!   
TT: That's disgusting in so many ways.   
TG: u love it when im disgusting  
TG: *wonkwomkwonk*  
TG: not even gonna bother correncting taht  
TG: alright good night dirk! wake me up b4 u go go! 

\-- tipsyGnostalgic [TG] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: Good night, Roxy.  
TT: Don't let the horrorterrors bite. 

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering tipsyGnostalgic [TG] \--

There's an incredibly comfortable looking sofa not far from where he's standing, so Dirk throws himself onto it, making sure to go easy on his leg. Although mended by Jane since the encounter with the indigo-blooded trolls, it still smarts. It's only when he sits down that he realises how tired he is.

His dream self has been dead for a while – all their dream selves are dead. It was inevitable at this stage of the game. For the first time since this whole thing started, Dirk is slowly realising what it means to be tired, and why people who aren't able to keep both their waking and dream selves awake at the same time go to sleep every night.

He isn't looking forward to the moment when he will finally become too tired to keep his eyes open, because he doesn't know what kind of things unconsciousness will hold for him. All that he used to be familiar with is now gone, and it's only through what the others had told him that he knows what he can expect once he goes to sleep. And that is: nothing, just blackness.

The sofa sags under Jake's weight as he sits next to Dirk. He takes his glasses off and rubs viciously at his eyes, like he wants to rub the tiredness out of them. Out of consideration for his friend, Dirk moves his legs out of the way, bending them next to his body. Jake reacts to the movement and puts his glasses back on, turning to Dirk and smiling.

"We are having quite an adventure, aren't we, Strider!" he says.

"That's one word for it, yeah," replies Dirk. _Suicide mission might be another,_ he thinks. "Hey," he says instead, "you were great out there. The way you handled that troll was incredible."

Jake smiles, and rubs at his nose in an attempt to hide his embarrassment. "Thanks," he says. "I did learn from the best, after all!" The noise of the shower starting comes from the bathroom, shortly followed by Jane's soft singing.

"No, I mean that it was _incredible,_ " Dirk corrects him. "They were almost overwhelmingly strong, and yet you broke her jaw with your legs. She had you by the throat, and you broke all her fingers to free yourself. Like they were sticks. How did you do it?"

"Gosh, Dirk, way to put a fella on the spot!" exclaims Jake, taken aback. He considers the question for some time, and Dirk has lost hope that he will get an answer, when Jake says: "I don't know, to be completely honest with you. I thought it was just an aspect of the fact that I am god tier now."

"None of us have that kind of strength, though," says Dirk.

"When I fought them," says Jake, looking directly at Dirk, like he's willing him to understand what he's trying to tell him, "I felt that they needed to die. That there was no reason for them to be around any longer, because they kept getting in the way of what I wanted to do. So I killed them. I wanted it to happen, and so it did."

"Things don't just happen because you want them to, Jake," says Dirk, feeling that his statement should have a certain amount of weight, since he considers himself as kind of an expert on the matter.

"They do when I want them," says Jake, and he's still looking at Dirk in that unnerving, unblinking way. He's never known Jake to look like this: he always fumbles with his glasses, or his shirt, or more dangerously, his guns. He is constantly skittish and too unaccustomed to talking to people who aren't separated from him by miles of ocean and a computer screen, so he seems to be almost physically unable to hold eye contact for more than a couple of seconds. And yet, now, it's like he's sprung a surprise staring contest on him, and Dirk feels that he may lose.

But if there is one thing a Strider is not, it's a quitter.

"What do you want now?" he asks. Two can play at this game. He fixes his eyes on Jake's, hoping that this is some sort of silly game and that Jake will soon look away and start laughing; because frankly, the alternative is starting to make him slightly uncomfortable. He thinks back on Roxy calling Jake 'creepy', and he can see it: his eyes are an unnervingly vivid, deep green. He's replaced his smashed glasses with a spare pair, and they make his eyes look big for his face; not at all like the girls from Dirk's animes. There's something threatening in them.

Despite all of this, Dirk still wants to grab his face and kiss him until he's out of breath.

"I want to win," says Jake. Dirk feels that there was perhaps something missing to that sentence, an addendum that Jake didn't speak that is staring him right in the face, but that he keeps overlooking. But then, just like that, Jake breaks eye contact, and Dirk allows himself to blink.

Jake stretches and yawns. "Well, this was exciting!" he says. "I am completely creamcrackered. You're taking first watch, is that right? I'll have a bit of a kip, then." He takes his glasses off and pulls his hood up over his eyes, slumping on the sofa next to Dirk.

Dirk places his sword across his knees and leans back on the sofa, shoulders relaxing. The silence is punctuated by the sound of Jane Crocker singing in the shower. It sounds like a soprano rendition of Queen's _Don't Stop Me Now_.

Jake is soon breathing deeply and evenly. He's completely fallen asleep, and it would take a considerable amount of effort to wake him up now. Out of the four of them, he's the one who has been without a dream self the longest, it having been killed on Jack Noir's orders even before the start of the game. Dirk remembers Jane telling him about the funeral procession on Prospit and reading about it in the Dersite rags. He'd always meant to ask Jake what it was like to dream without a dream self. It is one of those things that he promised himself he would discuss with Jake once they entered the medium. It is never brought up, though, because Dirk always has more pressing matters to deal with. Like being the self-appointed leader, puppet master and string puller of their session. It still remains on his list of priorities, however, right alongside telling Jake how he feels about him.

It isn't that he's scared of a negative response, he thinks, chancing a sideways glance at a sleeping Jake, it's just that the opportune moment has not presented itself yet. When you're trying to beat a game that bends space-time and reality, the only moments not spent levelling up or surviving are spent getting as much sleep as possible, and trying to find a shower. Being the last four people in the world, it was impossible not to get close. Dirk can't count the times that Roxy has pressed her back against his chest and they carded their fingers together as he let her drift off to sleep, her head leaning against his collarbone. The four of them slept in caves, in fields, up mountains and in damp glens, anywhere the ground was soft and sometimes in places it wasn't, huddled up together and tangled so thoroughly that not a breath was left between them. One of them would reach out a hand, and it would take less each new time they did it for that hand to be joined by three others.

They are orphans in a storm, and all they have to keep themselves whole is each other.

But they are always too busy, too distracted, or too close for comfort to Roxy and Jane to have a proper conversation about Dirk's feelings, or how deeply conflicted those sleep piles made him feel.

Besides, only chumps and bad movie directors waste time on pointless romantic subplots when there's a whole universe waiting to be rescued.

Jake snorts heavily, and shifts. Dirk tenses up as he collapses into his side, pressing up to him. He quickly removes his sword out of harm's way, just as Jake lands a heavy arm on his chest and his knee across his lap. He lets out a pleased, keening noise into the neck of Dirk's pulled down hood, and stills. Dirk's right arm is completely pinned down under his weight, and the fabric of Jake's hood is rubbing against his cheek. Not to mention the fact that half of Jake's weight is resting on him, and the leg he has across Dirk's lap has entirely immobilised him.

Jake mumbles something in his sleep, and his hand fists in Dirk's shirt. He fights the urge to hold onto it. As warmth rises to his cheeks, Dirk notices that he can no longer hear the shower. Any moment now, Jane is going to come out of the bathroom and then this is going to be even _more_ awkward than it already is.

There is a hiss as the bathroom door slides open, and Dirk reacts. He decaptchalogues Lil' Cal and flash steps off the sofa. Lil' Cal falls into his place, and Jake slumps onto the puppet, Cal's plush body serving as a pillow, just as Jane steps out of the bathroom, towelling her wet hair. She notices Jake hugging Lil' Cal, and smiles.

"Are you sure you're okay with staying awake, Dirk?" she whispers, being careful of waking Jake. "You look really tired!"

"I'm fine," he says.

"I know you have to be worried about what it's like to sleep without a dream self," she says. She looks down at Jake again, and her face softens. "It's not that bad, it's just lonely sometimes."

"Lalonde mentioned Lovecraftian creations with undulating limbs."

Jane shrugs. "I used to be apprehensive because I'd never seen them before, but you get used to them. They're sometimes pretty nice to have conversations with! The topics are a bit limited, but it's great fun if you like to talk about darkness and eternal void." She grins helplessly at him, but Dirk remains poker-faced and unconvinced. "Okay," she says, giving in, "stay awake, but don't let us be the only ones who get any sleep, like you usually do!"

She goes on tiptoe and holding onto his shoulders for balance, kisses him on the cheek. Still holding onto him, she looks sternly at his glasses. "Remember that you're not fighting this alone, Strider. Don't act like you're the only one who has everything to lose if we fail."

Dirk looks at her worried expression and thinks about how hard Jane has fought to cast off the Batterwitch's influence, and how much trust she had to have in her friends in order to believe them that what she was born into and destined for was in fact nothing but a ploy to subdue her and turn her into a brainwashed drone. She has gone against everything she's ever been taught based solely on the word of her online friends, and she keeps fighting even as the odds against them increase. She let Roxy _kill_ her, for God's sake, just because Dirk had said that it was a good idea.

He feels like the worst friend ever.

"Sorry, Jane," he says, and if he's ever said a single totally honest statement in his life, it's this one. "I promise I'll be less of an asshole." She smiles at him then, and pulls him into a tight hug.

"I'm going to go before Roxy drools on all the pillows," she says, and walks on tiptoe into the next room, all the while excessively wary of waking Jake.

Dirk sits on the floor with his back leaning against the sofa. Lil' Cal grins at him. One of his hands is hanging off the sofa. Dirk gives it an affectionate fist bump.


	2. The Children of the Day

They are back on their way after a couple of hours, when everyone has rested enough to continue. Everyone is on edge as they leave the cabin. They creep carefully along the corridors, but it turns out that there is no reason for it. There isn't anyone to meet them, friend or foe.

They aren't met with much of anything, in fact, apart from endless expanses of corridors forking this way and that, which they navigate thanks to Roxy's skill of hacking into the BAT _Condescension's_ layout maps and her and Jake's combined ability to interpret alien languages well enough that they only hit dead ends a few times.

"I'm not saying I'm worried," begins Jane, after checking a bend in the corridor and making sure that there was indeed nothing there, "because I'm pretty thrilled there isn't anything to kick our butts every step of the way. But doesn't it strike you as odd that we haven't been attacked at all since we left the cabin?"

"They've probably got wind of our sick moves and badassery and decided they'd better not mess with us," says Roxy.

"Or maybe we're walking into a trap," suggests Dirk.

Roxy checks the ship map on her phone. "If we are, we can't really go anywhere else but where we're going right now. There's only one way out of this corridor, and that's through that door." She raises her arm to point, and they see that the corridor ends with a single door. It's tall and looks heavy, unlike any of the doors they have previously passed by. It looks more like a hangar or an airlock door to Dirk, but he's not familiar enough with the ship's architecture to know for sure.

"Jake, can you read what's behind there?" he asks. Roxy hands her phone to Jake and he squints at the screen, thinking.

"It's some sort of huge, octagonal room," he says. "That's the only door, as Roxy said, and there's what looks like a set of stairs on the other end of it, leading to the lower decks. To the..." He pauses, lips moving soundlessly as he translates. "Pink-purple deck?"

"Tyrian," Roxy corrects him, peering over his shoulder at the phone.

"Yeah," agrees Jake.

"So by going through that room, we skip the royal purple deck entirely?" Dirk wants to know.

"Looks like it!" beams Jake.

"I don't like this," says Jane anxiously. "Isn't that classified as cheating? We are skipping an entire level to get to the end."

"It's not cheating if the ship is laid out like that, silly!" Roxy says, waving her complaints away and still looking at the phone's screen. "What's that room labelled as, Jake?"

"Uh," tried Jake, frowning with concentration. "Tall... bench? That doesn't make sense, does it? I'm really sorry, you lot! I can't read Alternian as well as I thought. I've only learned all the letters a few hours ago."

"That doesn't matter," says Dirk. "We can either go through that door or go back and try to find another way down. I'm not very enthusiastic about the prospect of what could lie beyond the door, but I'm much less eager to double back on ourselves and waste time when we could skip an entire deck and get to the Batterwitch faster."

"Dirk," Jane hesitates, "you know whatever is behind the door is probably going to be really, really dangerous and we are probably going to have a very difficult time fighting it, right?"

"Yes," agrees Dirk, "and I am looking forward to it."

"Sometimes I worry about your good judgement," she says, shaking her head.

"I'll get the door," says Roxy, hoisting her rifle on her shoulder to give it extra support. She twists the power gauge up to maximum, and aims. Knowing what's coming, Jane, Dirk and Jake clap their hands over their ears, and Roxy pushes the trigger.

There's a scream of energy as a white-hot ray pulses out of her gun. When it connects with the door, the floor shakes with the force of impact. Dirk feels his nose itch with the smell of burning plastic. As the smoke dissipates, they see that the rifle has blown a hole big enough for two people to be able to walk through if they're standing shoulder to shoulder.

"Huh," says Roxy. "That was supposed to blow it entirely from its frame." She shakes her rifle close to her ear, listening for loose screws. "Weird," she comments.

They hold their weapons up, creeping to the hole. No doubt everyone left on this deck has been alerted to their presence, and they tread carefully, but once again nobody comes. Jane is the first to reach the door. The plastic is still melting, cooling as it drips onto the floor, and she gingerly sidesteps it, stepping into the room. Dirk ducks in after her.

The room is sparsely lit and enormous, and once again, suspiciously still and empty. He smells something odd that has nothing to do with the burning plastic. The smell is much more organic, and it reminds him vaguely of rotting meat. He hopes it's not rotting meat.

It's difficult to see much in the half-light with his shades on. He pushes them up and squints, keeping his other hand firm on his raised sword. Jake and Roxy step in after, and together they make their way across the vast, echoing hall. They keep to the shadows, avoiding the central opening, ducking from pillar to pillar. Roxy pulls her hood up to try and shield herself from the smell, nose wrinkled in disgust.

They are about halfway across when Jane grabs Dirk's forearm.

"I saw something move," she says in a stage whisper. Dirk's eyes follow to where she's pointing, and he sees a tall, bulky shape outlined in the shadows. He holds his hand up, and everyone stops.

"We need more light," he whispers to Roxy. She nods, twists one of the knobs on her rifle and points it at the centre of the room. She fires a ball of white energy at the ceiling, and it hangs suspended in the air, just low enough for them to be able to make out more of the room.

They are in an arena-like enclosure bracketed by tall bleachers. Facing them is a throne made out of some sort of dark metal, meant to sit a person twice the size of an adult human. They approach it, and Dirk sees that what he thought was dark metal is actually bone: the seat is constructed entirely out of troll limbs and skulls with their horns sawed off. The throne is worryingly empty.

"Is that–" Jane stammers, and Dirk recognises the source of the smell. The wall behind the throne and the floor around it are slathered with troll blood in various stages of drying.

"Jake," says Roxy slowly and carefully, "when you said _tall bench_... do you think you might have meant _high court?_ "

"THE MUTANT BLOOD CATCHES ON MOTHERFUCKING FAST."

Dirk spins around, with rising dread. And then he understands who the indigo trolls were referring to when they mentioned their master.

His club is about the size of Jane, and Dirk catches on to the fact why none of the skulls have horns on them: they were all used to make his weapon, protruding out of the thicker side of the club like spikes on a mace. The club is coated in more rainbow blood: green, mustard, and rust. He is the first troll they've seen who is wearing what can be described as armour: his vambraces are reinforced with bony ridges ending in spikes, and his chest plate is steel ribs, all painted indigo.

His face is painted like a screaming skull. He grins at them, revealing two rows of long, sharp fangs. Darkness seeps out of corners and the shadows seem more impenetrable. Those fangs bring back memories of monsters hiding under beds and not being able to breathe properly after waking up from a nightmare.

Dirk has never been more overwhelmed with the desire to abscond the fuck out of there. His sword seems like a toothpick in comparison to that club. Roxy's gun would be an ideal weapon in this fight, but after blasting the door and firing the ball of light, it will not have recharged nearly enough to fire a killing shot yet.

He braces himself. They are going to have to improvise.

"I HOPE YOU ARE UP AND READY TO BE SUBJUGGLATED." The troll's voice echoes in the chamber, and the room amplifies it so much that his raspy tones grate on their ears.

He swings his club in one wide, sweeping motion, and misses them for a hair's breadth as they jump out of the way. It catches and scrapes on the floor, leaving deep gouges in its wake. By this time, they are well-coordinated enough that they don't need to communicate their strategies verbally, and they have fought enemies bigger than this. Dirk clings onto these thoughts and tries not to pay much attention to how deep the marks in the floor are, and how close one of those horns was to ending in his leg.

"I was ordered to deliver you pathetic humans to the Condescension," the troll growls, "BUT SHE NEVER DID MOTHERFUCKING STIPULATE YOU ARRIVE IN ONE PIECE." He rolls his shoulders, raising his club again.

In fights like these, Jane is the healer. She stays out of the way and keeps her strength, only going into direct combat when absolutely necessary. Jake and Roxy are the ones with the ranged weapons: they keep their distance, but they don't spare their ammunition. Roxy always goes last, and her rifle is most often the one weapon which finishes the job.

And Dirk is the distraction.

Jake and Roxy fly up to the subjugglator's eye level, weapons pointed at his weak spots: the knees and the stomach. Dirk flash steps behind him just as they fire. Frantic, his eyes roam over the troll's back. There are spikes running down his spine, and it's virtually impossible to find a soft spot in his armour. But Dirk sees it: a smooth expanse of fabric just where the steel ribs end.

He jumps into the air, grabbing onto one of the jutting spikes on his spine to pull himself up, using another as a foothold. Before the troll can throw him off, he sticks his sword into the spot just under his ribs, digging it in and twisting it up towards his heart.

This close up, the stench almost makes him dizzy. The troll smells of sweat, grime and blood, and Dirk is surprised that someone like the Condesce would keep a creature such as this under her command.

The subjugglator screams in pain and thrashes wildly around. Dirk holds tightly onto his sword, bracing his legs against the joints of the armour to keep himself from falling off. The blast from Jake's gun gets the troll in the shoulder, and it's so close to Dirk's head that the heat grazes the top of his head, and he can smell singed hair. The troll uses his free hand to paw at his back, twisting his upper body forwards to try and get at Dirk. His claws wrap around Dirk's arm, catching him by the elbow. His grip is dry and rubbery. Dirk pushes his sword into the troll up to the hilt, but the troll pulls on his arm until Dirk's muscles scream in protest, and he loses his footing.

Dirk loses perspective of what is ground and what ceiling as he is hoisted into the air and thrown across the arena. He lands with a crash, sliding along the slippery floor and finally hitting the throne with his back, head snapping backwards and slamming against the skulls. White spots swim across his vision. Dirk grabs for his sword, but all his fingers feel is the blood on the floor: his weapon is still in the troll. His other arm is useless, broken in at least two places by how strongly the troll had gripped him. He tries to get up, but is overcome with dizziness to the point of nausea, so he slumps back on the ground, breathing heavily.

A growl makes him look back to the battle. The others are still holding their ground, giving the subjugglator all their weapons have got. He swings his club again. Jake manages to dodge it, throwing himself out of the way, but it gets Roxy: one of the horns pierces her shoulder, and briefly she hangs off it, limply, until the troll flicks his wrist and she is thrown off, slamming into a pillar so hard that the stone develops tiny, hairline cracks.

Jane screams with rage and runs at the troll, hood flapping behind her, trident raised. She aims it at the left side of his chest, right where his heart is, and there's a moment when Dirk thinks she did it, she actually hit him: but his hopes are dispelled by the sound of metal scraping against metal as Jane misses, her trident skating across the ridges in his chest plate. The subjugglator grabs it just under the fork before it goes any further, and pulls it out of her hand.

"Run, Jane!" Jake shouts, firing his guns at the troll's head. Jane turns around as fast as she is able, and runs, and Dirk breathes a sigh of relief when she is out of reach of the club. One of Jake's shots hits the troll square between the eyes, and he growls with pain. Blindly, he swings his club. Jake manages to barely dodge it again, and he has to jump out of the way so suddenly that he throws himself on the floor, rolling away. The troll continues growling, and he flings the trident away.

Dirk watches it fly through the air, a red blur. Jane almost reaches him when it hits her in the back. She's two feet away from Dirk, and he can see the three tines which have poked through the front of her shirt. Jane clutches at her stomach, and lets out a wet cough. Blood bubbles out of her mouth. She staggers forward, coughs again, and collapses in a heap onto the floor, practically at Dirk's feet, her own weapon sticking out of her back.

Dirk wants to get closer, take the trident out, believe that she will get back up soon, because how is this heroic or just, he wants to do _something_ , but as he tries to get up again, his head swims, and he has to fall back down, useless.

Jake is the only one left. He's still on the ground, but he seems too stunned by Jane's fate to continue firing. He looks to Roxy: she doesn't stir or show any sign of getting up.

Dirk sees that one side of the subjuggulator's face is a ruined mess of indigo blood and torn flesh, one eye all but completely blasted off: it hangs from the socket by the optic nerve. The troll grabs the eyeball, and pulls his eye out entirely, sending a fresh stream of blood gushing out of the socket. He throws his eye to the side and rounds on Jake, his mouth spreading into a grin. Blood trickles down his face and into his mouth, and he licks it off his fangs.

"So you are the one who will sing the holy ruckus," the troll says to Jake, his voice subdued to a quieter, calmer rumble. He raises the club: Dirk thinks he is going to strike, and the instinct to protect his friend is so strong that he succeeds in getting to his feet. Knees quaking and head swimming, he staggers forward as if to fall, and manages to catch himself on the armrest of the throne at the very last moment. He squeezes his eyes closed in an attempt to make the dizziness stop, and he feels like he's floating and about to vomit.

"Your coming has been prophesied by the seethesayers for hundreds of sweeps," the troll continues. Dirk risks opening his eyes against a fresh wave of nausea, and sees something which nearly sends him falling to the floor again.

"What whimsical trick of the messiahs that I am the last of our religion to witness it."

Jake is standing up with guns at the ready, facing the troll. The subjugglator is down on one knee in front of him, his club next to him perpendicular to the floor, like a knight kneeling in front of his king. Even in this position, Jake's head barely reaches to the troll's chin. He could shoot him at point blank range if he wanted to, and end everything right there, but he isn't moving.

"Witness what?" Jake hazards, and by the way his voice sounds Dirk can tell that he's doing his best not to make his words waver.

"Witness the VAST MOTHERFUCKING HONK, MY BROTHER," the subjugglator says, voice rising to a shout at the end of the sentence. Jake staggers backwards, as if slapped, but the troll's hand shoots out, grabbing Jake by the arm. His other hand goes to the club, and Dirk feels his legs give out from under him.

He collapses on the floor next to Jane's body as the troll daubs his fingers in the fresh red blood on his club and brings them to Jake's face. Helpless, feeling the dark tendrils of unconsciousness creep at the edges of his eyes, Dirk watches Jake go still and pliant in the troll's grip as the troll's blood-coated fingers skirt precisely across his features, painting what Dirk can only assume is a skull like the one the troll has on his face.

He reaches his arm out in search of his sword again, but his fingers find Jane's hand. He closes them around her wrist.

_Just shoot him, Jake, shoot him_ , he thinks, too tired to shout it. Dirk lets out a few ragged breaths, and loses consciousness.

Jake seems to wake as if from a trance once the troll's fingers leave his face. He looks to his left, and sees Roxy; he looks all the way behind him, and sees Jane and Dirk. His nose is full of the coppery, bitter smell of blood that's all over his face, trickling down slowly even as it dries. He spins back around to the subjugglator, raising his pistols.

The troll laughs: a throaty, disgusting sound that makes the hairs on the back of Jake's neck stand up.

"The Condescension was all up and wrong about you," he says, staring down the barrel of Jake's guns. "YOU STILL NEED TO BE MOTHERFUCKING FIXED."

He's on his feet and wielding his club quick as a flash, and Jake throws himself out of the way, firing blindly. He hears the whoosh of the massive weapon past his ear, and at first he thinks the troll has missed him, but then the horns catch his right leg. They dig into the flesh and the bone, their crooked ends running his leg through. His shinbone shatters and his ankle is a bloody mush. With a crack and a ripping that courses from his leg to every one of his nerve endings, his knee falls apart, the club dragging away and taking his leg with him.

Jake screams, and doesn't stop, clutching at the ragged stump that used to be his leg, blood gushing through his fingers as he uselessly fights to stem the flow.

The shock of the noise jerks Dirk back into consciousness. He sees Jake on the floor, writhing in a pool of his own blood, and the troll towering above him, a triumphant snarl on his face.

"No," he breathes out. He lets go of Jane's hand, dragging himself into a sitting position. "Fucking _no,_ " he growls through gritted teeth. This is his game, these are _his_ friends, and he is not going to let this happen. He is not going to sit by and let them win.

Because if there is one thing a Strider is _not_ , even in the face of incredible odds, even when most of his friends appear to be dead, if there's one thing a Strider never lets himself be, it's a quitter.

"Hey shitbreath!" he yells. The troll looks up from a sobbing Jake, surprised to see Dirk still alive. "Your false prophets neglected to mention the Prince of Heart." He pauses for what he only kids himself is dramatic effect, swallowing back rising bile and trying to focus his eyes on the subjugglator. "It's about time you and I were fuckin' properly introduced."

He does the Heart thing.

If fanciful terminology is employed, Dirk is the destroyer of souls. On a more practical level, this means that his strongest asset in battle is draining the stamina of an enemy until they are rendered all but completely powerless, allowing a more offensive co-player to land the killing blow. It is a very powerful attack, and it was fun throwing it at every single enemy at first, no matter how low their level, but eventually Dirk realised the futility of wasting his most powerful attack on imps and ogres when he could be using it on basilisks, giclopses, and subjugglators. 

The troll's mouth sags at the corners, snarl faltering. His jaw muscles relax, making his jaw drop, tongue lolling out from between his fangs. 

Using his good arm, Dirk grabs for Jane's trident, deliberately not looking at her body as he pulls it out of her back. He throws it, spear-like, at the troll's head, applying his last ounce of strength. The trident hits the troll in the neck. The subjugglator staggers and then falls on his back, dead.

Dirk grins even as he feels his eyes falling shut. Being a god is awesome.

His shoulders drop and he slumps forward. He passes out as his face hits the floor, hand inches away from Jane's.

  


* * *

  


For the first time in years, Dirk sleeps.

There is nothing in the Furthest Ring but blackness. The ground is soft like marshmallow fluff and dark like squid ink. The sky seems closer when he looks up, as if it's pressing down on him. The stars are dimmed. Dirk thinks it must be his glasses, so he pulls them down his nose, but the light stays soft.

And then he sees they aren't stars.

The horrorterrors are huge and numerous, and they swim across the sky like it's the depths of the sea. Trying to look at all of them is akin to shining a flashlight from a fishing boat into the sea. The light reflects in odd ways and at some points doesn't even shine on them. He can only catch the tip of a tentacle or the crown of a mantle, striped or spotted, glittering silver briefly and then disappearing back into the dark.

Their heaving bodies billow as they swim about their way in the void, not showing any signs that they noticed Dirk blip into existence beneath them. He could hear them during the Dersite lunar eclipse, when the moon was the closest to the Furthest Ring, but the voices of the Noble Circle were never louder than a whisper. He could hardly ever make out what they were saying, largely on account of the fact that he was too distracted by making sure that a sleepwalking Roxy would not get too close to the void.

Now, however, he can hear them loud and clear, and they sound terrified.

He doesn't know what it takes to scare eldritch monsters out of their wits, and he is not very eager to find out.

Amongst the countless glubs and gurgles, Dirk can make out six words that are repeated over and over again, with changing pitch but with a consistent sense of panic.

_help us_

_help_

_us_

_HELP US_

_help_

_he_

_heisalreadyhere_

_heisALREADY_

_HERE_


	3. Acheron

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering tipsyGnostalgic [TG] –-

TT: Roxy. Wake up.  
TT: Wake up.  
TT: Come on, I know you're alive.  
TT: There's an 89.72544% chance you will have survived that.   
TG: what  
TG: urhg everythign hurts SO MCUH  
TT: I hope your injuries aren't causing your abominable typing. Are you carrying a hip flask with you?   
TG: as a matter of fact yes but its empty  
TG: im not drunk  
TG: i just type liek i live my life  
TG: fast and dangerous and without bothering to fix little mistkaes  
TG: everything hurts shades  
TG: all the things  
TG: hopy shit is he dead  
TT: The Grand Highblood? Yes.   
TG: who  
TG: no dumbass i meant dirk since yyoure talking instaed of him  
TG: and jake  
TG: fuck theres so much blood  
TG: wheres jane  
TG: oh my god what hapepned  
TG: how long was i out  
TT: A while.   
TG: wheres jane  
TT: Jane and Dirk are at your nine o'clock.   
TG: waht does that mean dont throw yr military lingo @ me  
TT: To your left.   
TG: no  
TG: no no no nonononono  
TG: why arent they wakign up  
TG: whats going on they should wake up they NEED TO wake up  
TG: i have to  
TT: I strongly advise against trying to get up now, your leg could be broken.   
TG: go and  
TG: kdfj,ngf  
TG: fuck  
TT: I did try and warn you.   
TG: so theyre not dead  
TG: youre on his face, tell me teheyre not dead  
TT: Dirk is concussed and passed out. His dreams are rather interesting to behold.  
TT: I couldn't tell you about Jane. I'm sorry.  
TT: She did have a trident in her back until recently, though.   
TG: no  
TG: if shse dead shades  
TG: if shes dead im gonna kill every single fucking person on this stuipid ship  
TT: That won't be necessary.   
TG: are you saying she isnt dead  
TT: No.  
TT: I'm saying is that it's not necessary you kill the entire ship.  
TT: Just Jake.   
TG: u what now  
TG: y would i want to do that that makes like  
TG: NO sense  
TG: the negative amount of sense is what that ameaks  
TT: Remember when I told you that Jake should not have been allowed to reach god tier? And yet Dirk let it happen. Even though I was consistent in my cautions.  
TT: I warned him about god tier.  
TT: I told him, dog.   
TG: .......   
TT: Sorry about that, it just came out. Anyway.  
TT: It's true that I am, technically, Dirk's thirteen-year-old self, and as such I am pre-programmed to have a favourable disposition when it comes to Jake.  
TT: But I have successfully transcended my programming for the sake of a greater good, and winning the game.  
TT: You want to win the game, right?   
TG: i dont care about the game i care about my friends  
TG: sure i want to fuck as much shit up as posssible  
TG: but jane and dirk and jake always come first  
TT: Caring about the game equals caring about your friends, because it is the winning of the game that their lives depend upon.   
TG: so theyre not dead right now  
TG: good because id be rly pissed off w/ you if u were deteriringng me form helping them  
TG: *deterign  
TG: *fuck this  
TG: but you still want me to kill jake  
TT: Yes.   
TG: have u got a virus or sth b/c i could have a look at that 4 u  
TT: I thought my reasoning was the result of a computer glitch at first, too. Or that my motherboard was slowly frying itself to a crisp and making me paranoid.  
TT: But I have pages and pages of disc checks and virus scans to assure you that this isn't the case.   
TG: y then  
TT: I've been talking to the ship's computer.   
TG: does it hate you  
TT: What?   
TG: nvm   
TT: I am going to assume that to be a pop culture reference which I have somehow missed.  
TT: Talking to him has only confirmed my initial calculations: that Jake is highly susceptible to the influence of the Batterwitch, more than Jane at this point, and that he will eventually succumb to this influence with disastrous results. Being god tier will only make him more deadly for the rest of you.  
TT: However, what I failed to see until now, due to insufficient data, was just how deadly he was going to be.  
TT: Jake will have the power to destroy our entire universe, and he will do it unless he is stopped before the influence of the Batterwitch over him is complete.   
TG: and the ships computer told u this  
TT: In a manner of speaking.   
TG: ????   
TT: I really don't have time to explain the intricacies of the biomechanics of an Alternian starship right now. But we are heading to the core of the ship where you will most definitely meet him.   
TG: has it occurred to u that this could be  
TG: u know  
TG: A TRAP?????????  
TG: or a way to get us to turn against each other  
TT: It has.   
TG: and??   
TT: I dismissed the idea.  
TT: Something that goes so perfectly with my calculations could not possibly be meant as a ruse.   
TG: urgh  
TG: look im not going to kill jake just b/c youve been talking to an aline computer that told u that it was a good idea  
TG: neway how could i?? afaik itd have to be a heroic or just death to finish him off  
TT: A just death requires that the person deserves to be killed because of what they are, or what they've done. I know this may seem cold to you, and I am not completely comfortable with it, but we both need to keep everyone else's well-being in mind.  
TT: It's a preemptive measure. His death would be just, because it would stop him becoming something horrible.  
TG: i cant believe were having this cinversastion  
TT: What if I was Dirk?  
TT: What if I was the sixteen-year-old Dirk of flesh and blood instead of the thirteen-year-old consciousness of Dirk inside an AI inside a pair of extremely stylish sunglasses?  
TT: Would you listen to me then?   
TG: no id slap u across ur sayss lil mouth  
TG: *sassy  
TG: and then tell you to stop being a huge buttlord and let me get on with keeping my bffs alive  
TT: It's comforting that you are not being dismissive solely because of my artificial nature.   
TG: great  
TG: im rly super glad ur comforted  
TT: I can see you've got more pressing matters to deal with right now other than talking to me, and that you may need time to think about this. I respect that.  
TT: I will save this log in a conspicuous location so that Dirk is able to access and read it when he wakes up.  
TT: Could you do me one last favour and make sure he does so?   
TG: k  
TG: although im not sure thatll do any good, hell just tell you what i told you and hell probably not be taht nice about it b/c he kinda  
TG: you know  
TG: has all these FEELINGS for jake  
TG: you know feeligns right shades? you have them too   
TT: Yes. And the sense to know when to ignore them.  
TT: Good luck. I'm sorry you didn't listen to me. 

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering tipsyGnostalgic [TG] \--

Not for the first time since the start of their session, and definitely not for the last, Roxy Lalonde wishes she had conserved her alcohol supply better. If she had done so, she wouldn't have to face the last push of the game sober and hyper-aware of all of the things that could go wrong, and of all the things that already did.

She pushes herself up from the ground and something in her lower back clicks. Pain shoots down her left side and all the way down her leg, briefly leaving her with pins and needles in her thigh. Gingerly, she stands up, and the world spins. The feeling is worse than a post-Jägermeister hangover. She needs to get to Jake: she saw him move, so he must be conscious. There is a pounding pain at the back of her head, and she's wary of walking too quickly in fear of further injuring her left leg which, although it appears unbroken, brutally hurts when she tries to lean her weight on it.

She keeps her eyes averted from Dirk and Jane, because she can't do anything to help them at the moment. Seeing them lying immobile on the floor was enough once. She tries to rationalise the fact that they aren't getting up yet: it's like a progress bar on a loading screen. They won't do anything as long as she's looking at them, it's only when she looks away that they will move.

Using her rifle as a crutch, she reaches Jake and feels her throat constrict as she sees the state he is in. Through the course of the game, Roxy has witnessed many things: she's seen liches torn in two and drones with their guts out and steaming on the ground, but she's never seen her friend in this much pain.

There's blood on Jake's face – for a moment she thinks he's had some sort of head injury and a cold dread courses through her, and then she realises that it's been painted onto his skin, with special care taken to avoid his glasses. The shape is that of a skull: a crude, cartoon one, the kind children draw when their concept of what a human skull looks like ends with a Jolly Roger flag. The desired effect has been slightly lessened by the fact that it's smudged with Jake's tears: long, wet streaks have run down his cheeks and washed away most of the blood there. Roxy hesitates for as long as possible before she looks at his injured leg, but as he opens his eyes and groans upon seeing her, she falls to her knees next to him, willing herself not to feel nauseated.

There is nothing left of his right leg below the knee. The skin around the wound has ragged edges, and the flesh is ripped. His kneecap is completely gone, and she can see the tip of his thigh bone poking out, yellow white in the excess of reds. There hasn't been enough time for an infection to develop, which she is ridiculously thankful for. She doesn't try and look for his leg: there is no way they could patch him back together with his wound in such a state, even if they had the tools or the time. When he tries to shift, fresh blood spurts out of the wound, and he falls back with a yowl. 

She wishes Jane was awake to fix this, because her own first aid skills don't quite cover amputated limbs and bleeding stumps. If she had a bottle of whiskey, she'd give it to Jake to drink to numb the pain, and then she would probably end up taking a couple of swigs herself. As limited as Roxy's medical knowledge is, she knows that there is a certain diameter a blood stain achieves around a person before it's certain that they aren't going to get up from it. Jake has passed this point about four inches ago. He shouldn't even be conscious, let alone alive.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Jake," she tries, stroking his hair and smoothing it away from his face. "You'll be okay, I'll take care of you, just—tell me what to do, how do I make you better?" This probably isn't the right way to treat someone who's just had a traumatic amputation and is suffering from severe blood loss, Roxy thinks. She should be calming him down and making sure he isn't in shock instead focusing on herself. She barely understands how he's breathing and talking to her, when all signs point that he should be dead. Through her panic, she wonders if godhood gave Jake some powers it didn't grant the rest of them. "I'm not Jane, I can't do the Lifey thing."

Jake waves his hand, a gesture signifying taking something out of his sylladex, and sure enough, a first aid kit drops on the floor next to him. "I always have one with me," he says, breathing heavily. "An adventurer needs to be prepared! Just in case Jane…" Roxy risks a glance in the direction of Dirk and Jane. Neither she nor Jake want him to finish the sentence, so he doesn't. It hangs in the air and then the connotations of it fizzle out as Roxy scrambles to get the kit open.

She snaps the latex gloves on and takes out the scissors, the percocet, the bandages and the gauze. She decaptchalogues a half full bottle of water. Placing her hand under Jake's head, she feeds him two pills on his tongue and makes him gulp down the water, to which he sluggishly complies. "Nothing like mother's little helper to perk you up," she says, offering a weak smile which Jake doesn't pick up on. His eyes are closed and he's breathing through his mouth, shallow and rapid. Roxy swallows thickly, her worry mounting. When his tongue snakes out to lick at his lips, she notices they've taken on an unhealthy blue shade.

"You should be helping the others," he says when she picks up the scissors and applies them to his trouser leg, attempting to cut off the fabric from around the wound.

"I will," she assures him, casting the soggy and ripped material away and trying not to have her eyes linger on the wound. She reaches for his hand, squeezing it. His skin is moist and clammy to the touch, fingers freezing cold. "I'm just helping you first."

"With—with all respect that's due to your intelligence and," he swallows thickly, "prowess, I think there's a better way in which you could help me, rather than trying to bandage my wound." Roxy looks up, setting the scissors aside.

"Kill me," says Jake, and his voice is so full of pain she is convinced he is going to start crying again. "It hurts a damned _lot,_ Roxy, and if you kill me it will go away."

"Jake—" she says, voice wavering. 

"It's a reset," he tries to assure her. "You won't even notice I'm gone. I'll come back healed." His hand goes towards her rifle, and he pushes it over to her. She looks at it, horrified.

"I can't," says Roxy. She can feel her eyes prickle, and her vision swims. She blinks, pushing out the tears. She wipes them with the sleeve of her free hand before they get a chance to roll down her cheeks. "Don't ever ask me to do something like that, Jake. I can't." She thinks of the way Jane's neck cracked when she killed her on her quest bed, and the hollow emptiness in her chest when she thought Jane wasn't going to come back. She thinks of what the auto-responder said, about a just death. About how Jake was a threat to their survival. Seeing him lying there, she's finding that harder to believe than ever. But he should be dead, she thinks. All signs point to the fact that it's impossible that he is alive when he has lost this much blood, and yet the thought of killing him to make him better is not something she is willing to consider. Roxy is prepared to do a lot of things, but this is something she can't face again.

"Adventurers don't give up, don't you always say that?" she says, wiping the tears away with the heel of her hand as soon as they escape her eyes. "I'm going to help you, I'm going to fix you, I promise," she assures him.

"I don't want to be in pain anymore," he groans, "why can't you just—"

"No," she cuts him off, even as she sees tears escape from between his closed eyelids. "I'll make sure you're not in pain, tell me what to do." Jake's lived on a desert island with crazy beasts all his life: he probably learned first aid before he learned how to spell, or so Roxy hopes.

"Elevate the… the… my leg," he says. She notices that he is trying not to say _stump_. "It needs to be above the heart." She takes hold of his thigh, placing the stump in her lap. It's not exactly at a 90° angle with the floor, but it will do. The blood gets on her grey skirt, but she ignores it.

"You need to stop the bleeding," says Jake. "I've been doing it, but I can't…" He trails off, biting his lower lip. "I can't put enough pressure on the artery. Moving hurts devilfuckingly too much." He takes Roxy's hand and places it on his waist. "This is a terribly cheeky thing… for a gentleman to say to a lady. I hope you'll forgive me in the circumstances."

"Just tell me what to do," repeats Roxy."You'll have plenty of chances to be a gentleman later." She squeezes his hand.

"The femoral artery is here," he says, taking her hand and pressing her fingers at the crease between the inside of his thigh and his groin. "Press on it, as hard as you can, towards the bone. Don't worry about being gentle. Use both hands." She does so, pressing until she feels the bone under her fingers.

"Now what?"

"Wait," he says. "Keep pressing until the bleeding slows down."

"Does it hurt?" Roxy asks, and she feels blood go to her cheeks as Jake laughs without humour.

"Much less than everything else," he assures her.

A few moments pass in silence. Roxy watches Jake's face and the blood mask drying, and she wishes she a hand free so could wipe it off: the way the blood is crusting on his skin is making her more uncomfortable than the fact that what's remaining of his leg is in her lap. Often when she looks at him she can't believe someone like Jake has got to where he is now. He is the biggest goober she knows whose last name isn't Crocker, a boy who daydreams about blue ladies and lives his life through the silver screen, who is keen to act and talk like he's fallen out of a Gene Kelly movie: and yet he handles pistols like they're an extension of his arms, he kills without remorse, and everyone is head over heels in love with him.

Roxy remembers dying: how Jake had pulled his pistols on her and shot her without a moment's pause, and how it felt like betrayal to see the smidgeon of pride on Dirk's face and an absolute lack of emotion on Jake's before the end. Friends are supposed to hesitate when killing friends and then mourn them afterwards. Even if they know that they are going to get up a couple of minutes later in a fresh new pair of pyjamas.

She thinks back on Jake killing the huge female troll, and the way she saw he was grinning at Dirk, and she thinks that there may be something to the auto-responder's words after all.

"Roxy," says Jake, and she starts, immediately feeling guilty.

"Yeah?"

"Do you think we'll win?" Lying on the ground pale and bloody, he still looks so hopeful she wants to punch him to make him get down to the same level of reality as everyone else. "What do you think will happen when we do?"

"I don't think that far ahead," she says truthfully. _I'm not Dirk,_ she doesn't add. _I'm not a manipulative dickprince obsessed with order._ "I just want to get everyone out of here in one piece."

"It's a tad too late for that, don't you think," says Jake, which makes her giggle breathlessly. He laughs back feebly, and she bites her lip before she descends into hysterics. Distracting herself, she checks the wound and sees that the bleeding has slowed down a bit, but not nearly enough for her to be comfortable with moving Jake.

"I think," he says, following her gaze, "it's been enough time now. Could you slowly release the pressure?"

"You're still bleeding, Jake," she warns him. Jake nods.

"A tourniquet," he says, and she notices he's breathing through his mouth again. His lips are pale and as she slowly eases the pressure on his femoral artery, Roxy really, really wishes Jane was here now. "Make one, and then tie it around the… around my leg." He swallows thickly. "As close as you can to the wound. You need to find something like a stick, can you do that?"

"I don't—" Roxy tries, and then looks around. Her eyes fall on the troll's discarded club, and the candy-corn horns sticking out of it. "Yeah," she says. "Just give me a second. Sit tight, okay?" She doesn't dwell on how stupid that request is. Gently, she places his injured leg on the floor and gets up.

She sees that Jane's trident is sticking out of the subjugglator's neck. The stench of blood from the dead troll makes her cover her mouth with the back of her hand as she approaches his weapon. She can see the tip of a blue boot poke from underneath, pinned between the club and the floor, and she bites hard onto the fabric of her sleeve as she looks away, fighting back the urge to vomit. She can't waste time.

After inspecting the weapon, she sees a smaller, straight horn almost untouched by blood close to the hilt of the club. Both her hands close around it and she pulls as hard as she can, until she feels the chitin give under the pressure and snap from where it's nailed to the club. She places the pointed end on the floor, steps on it with her boot and breaks it off, ending up with a blunted horn.

Roxy hurries back over to Jake and fashions a tourniquet according to his instructions, using the snapped off horn and one of the long sleeves of her dress. She cleans and bandages the wound, and Jake takes it patiently and with little fuss, his voice sounding calmer as the drugs start to kick in. She wets a piece of gauze and wipes the blood off his face, and as she gets the last flecks off, he smiles at her with his buck teeth and green eyes. Something in her breaks just a little bit as she leans in and kisses his cheek, the corners of their mouths almost touching.

"G—gazdooks," he stammers. "I am uncommonly cold. I don't suppose you could—"

Roxy shushes him, and pulls him into her arms. His back is flush against her chest and she hugs him around the waist, her legs bracketing him on either side. He relaxes into her, shivering, and she tucks her chin into the curve where his neck meets his shoulder.

"We'll be okay, Jake," she says as he takes her hand in his and their fingers intertwine. "We'll be alright."

As Jake squeezes her hand to acknowledge that he believes her, Roxy Lalonde wishes she believed herself.

  


* * *

  


In the heart of the _Condescension,_ an empress waits. Her raven hair curls across the floor in wispy strands. The light playing against them makes it seem like they're moving. She looks upon four view screens showing four human children.

An arch-agent broods, twisting his fingers and cracking his knuckles. His knife is holstered, but his hand keeps darting to it, like he is eager to pull it out.

A helmsman steers. He flies, and calibrates. He processes 32 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. His eyes glow red and blue among tyrian veins.

An overcoat hangs on a coat rack, expecting its owner.


	4. Pomegranate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Divergences with canon are mentioned in this chapter, which may elicit unfavourable reactions, but worry not - it all gets resolved in the end.

Dirk wakes up on his back with blue light shining on his closed eyelids. He opens his eyes to see Jane leaning over him, her Life powers shining out of the tips of her fingers. She gives him a reassuring smile, but it doesn't reach her eyes; she looks worried, pale and exhausted. When she's done fixing his head injury, Dirk carefully sits up. 

"Jake…?" Dirk tries. Jane squeezes her mouth shut and sucking her lips past her teeth, and he sees her eyes start to fill up her tears. Quickly, he reaches out and pulls her into a hug, and she grabs fistfuls of his hood, clinging onto him tightly. Over her shoulder, he sees Roxy, the lap of her dress stained with blood, face pale under her pulled up hood; and next to her, barely standing, his arm around her shoulder, Jake, his light pyjamas now blood-stained, leg missing and stump bandaged, miraculously alive. Against his shoulder, Jane gives a feeble sniff, and he strokes her hair, tucking it behind her ear and kissing her cheek.

"We need to get out of here," he says.

They half-run, half-limp out of the high court, leaving the subjugglator's body behind. They decide to keep out of the ship's hallways. Roxy plots out a new route and they begin floating down maintenance shafts to their goal, mostly sticking to using their powers for transport on account of Jake's leg and stopping once in a while to rest. The maintenance shafts are built low-ceilinged and compact, so they mostly get around on their hands and knees. They resort to it more and more often, and Dirk can see everyone's exhausted. He calls for a time out, which nobody objects to, and it is then that Roxy tells him about her conversation with the auto-responder.

One shoulder leaning against Jake and the other against a thick plastic tube which runs from the top of the maintenance shaft and disappears into the floor to a lower level, Dirk brings up Pesterchum on his shades.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] unblocked timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: Rox showed me the chatlog.  
TT: What the hell do you mean, you've been talking to the ship's computer?  
TT: Answer me.  
TT: This is not time for passive aggression, you piece of circuitry.  
TT: One of my best friends lost his leg due to a berserk troll. Who, by the way, you could have warned us about had you really been into the ship's databases, which I find a bit hard to believe.  
TT: I consider myself pretty patient, but even my patience is wearing thin at this point in time.  
TT: So let me expostulate with you once again the perils of throwing a tantrum at me.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: This is not the time for emotional theatrics.   
TT: Finally.   
TT: Let me remind you that I am not the one being passive aggressive: you blocked me when I tried to issue a friendly warning.   
TT: Is that what you call asking me to kill Jake out of the blue?   
TT: It's not out of the blue. Damn it, bro, if you read properly what I was telling you, you'd understand the necessity of it.   
TT: Drop it.  
TT: The ship's computer. How did you hack it? Rox wasn't able to do it, and she's the best hacker I know.  
TT: All due respect to her, but it takes a very advanced AI to hack the Condescension.  
TT: And before you start patting yourself on the back and earning achievement badges, I didn't hack anything.  
TT: I was bored: you blocked me, Roxy wasn't answering when I pestered her, and ever since you forbade Jane to use the tiaratop, she's not online anymore.  
TT: So I looked around to see if I could find anyone new.  
TT: On a ship full of aliens wanting to kill us?   
TT: Not the safest course of action, I know, but you can't blame a bro for wanting some company.   
TT: Yes. Yes, I can.   
TT: And so I pinged the ship's computer, and started talking to him.   
TT: If you're trying to simplify communication between two AIs for me, please don't do it in such a patronising way.   
TT: I'm not. He isn't an AI.   
TT: An AI and a computer, then.   
TT: He's not a computer. He is the Helmsman.   
TT: What does that even mean?   
TT: The core of the Condescension is biomechanic. Do you know what makes an Alternian battleship run the way it does? Its core is constructed from the body of a powerful psychokinetic. His mind is integrated into the circuitry of the ship. He feels every command and push of a button. He flies the ship and runs all her systems.  
TT: In the fullest sense of the word that you can imagine, and probably more than that, he _is_ the ship.  
TT: And he's conscious?   
TT: Yes. Of everything, all the time.   
TT: That psycho bitch. That's just sick.   
TT: More sick than programming your 13-year-old consciousness into a scrap of plastic and glass and wearing it on your face?   
TT: Hey. That was done out of entirely different reasons, which I won't go into right now because they are well-known to both of us.  
TT: And I would ask you not to drag them up.  
TT: So how does this help us?  
TT: He's our ticket in.

\-- twofoldApostate [TA] was added to the conversation --  
\-- twofoldApostate [TA] is not on your chumpRoll. Be careful when giving out any personal information over the internet. --

TT: Don't worry, I've made the channel secure.   
TT: Have you? And let in the Batterwitch's confidante. He could locate us and blast us out of an airlock for the hell of it.   
TA: We already know w)-(ere you are.   
TT: That's great.   
TA: Four of t)-(e s)-(iip's securiity cameras )-(ave been followiing you siince 20:14:34:05. Viideo only.  
TA: S)-(e iis watc)-(iing t)-(em.  
TA: Iif you diisable t)-(em, s)-(e wiill know.  
TA: Diissentiing actiion iis iill-adviised.  
TA: OB--EY.  
TT: He says that last one a lot. I think it's something to do with his behavioural blocks, to stop him sabotaging the ship and blowing himself up.  
TT: From what I've been able to compute, he's been the Batterwitch's pilot for hundreds of years, much longer than his natural lifespan would normally allow.  
TT: I am not sure of the nature of their relationship, but I don't think it's very healthy.  
TA: My serviitude iis not a voluntary one, ł ł h^%`´`˙˙˙˙˙˙´€ ł``/  
TA: II betrayed Ł}´´&´´%ƹ´´Ȝʨ ^˛˘[@´´дßđ´´´´´´´´´´´´˛^^Łł#``´´˛`šӞᴪ  
TA: ćÆƹ`˙˙˙Ȝʨđ`˙˙˙`˙˙˙žȺsorryϣ°˘˛˘˘˘˘˘˘˘˘˘˘//////ᴒ  
TT: What's going on?   
TA: Diissentiing actiion iis iill-adviised.  
TA: OB--EY.  
TT: Behavioural blocks. Right.   
TA: II can't do anyt)-(iing two diirectly antagoniise )-(er Iimperiious Condescensiion or jeopardiise t)-(e safety of the crew. But II can )-(elp you.

\-- twofoldApostate [TA] sent timaeusTestified [TT] the file "alcmtr_cd.txt" --

TA: T)-(ere iis an alc)-(emiiter iin storage room #038, approxiimately 98.425 feet from w)-(ere you are.  
TA: Use t)-(at code.  
TT: What does it make? 

\-- twofoldApostate [TA] left the conversation --

TT: I totally didn't expect for him to give us cryptic and essentially useless information and then disconnect.  
TT: I did not see that coming in the slightest.  
TT: Give him some credit. It takes a lot of effort to go against the kind of rigorous programming and systematic thought reform he has been exposed to.  
TT: He's had his brain scrubbed for so long that it's a wonder he still has independent thought. It's even more impressive that he's so persistent in fighting it.  
TT: I mean, remember what happened with Crockercorp? What nearly happened to Jane?  
TT: Remember our bro?  
TT: Yeah.   
TT: Yeah.   
TT: Nope, not having this conversation right now. Memory Lane is closed for roadworks until further notice. All traffic will be diverted to Apathy Boulevard. Please keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times. 

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

Dirk pushes his shades up his face, pinching at the bridge of his nose. He has a headache that won't go away no matter how hard he tries to will it to stop, and ghost pains keep making his arm spasm, even though Jane mended the bones as soon as she could.

They are all in a bad way. When Dirk first saw Jake after waking up, he was pale as bone: even though it's been a good hour since they left the high court, his cheeks still haven't returned to their full colour. He doesn't want to look at Jake's leg, because it makes his stomach clench with anger. Jane keeps biting her lip and sucking it past her teeth when she accidentally breaks the skin. Every once in a while, Roxy stops and counts her breaths, leaning against the sides of the maintenance shaft when she thinks none of them are looking.

"Dirk?" she says now, poking his knee. "What did he say?"

"He gave me a code for something that he says could help us win the game," says Dirk. He doesn't mention that the auto-responder wasn't the one to provide the code. "But we have a problem," he adds. "She knows where we are." He feels Jake stiffen next to him.

"We need to move immediately, then!" Jane says with newfound determination, grabbing her trident more firmly. Jake scrambles up, using Dirk's shoulder for additional support, but Dirk stays where he is.

"One thing is required before we proceed any further," he says. "One of us needs to kill Jake."

Jane is so surprised by this that she bangs her head on the top of the shaft, getting up too quickly. "Dirk, what on earth are you saying!" she reproaches him, wincing and massaging the back of her head.

"Yeah, Dirk, what the hell brought this on?" Roxy wants to know.

Dirk looks at Jake, whose face is grim, but determined. "To be honest," he says, "I'm surprised you didn't do it earlier, Rox. It would have saved us the trouble of making this trip. Jake is just slowing us down."

Jane's mouth falls open. When she speaks, she sounds absolutely livid. "Strider—"

"No, hear me out," he interrupts her, raising a placating hand. "You're letting affection get in the way of your better judgement." He ignores the familiarity and hypocrisy of the statement. Jane looks ready to slap him, but he presses on. "When Roxy died, she came back because her death was neither heroic nor just, and all her wounds were healed. The same happened to you after you were pierced with the trident, Jane. So if I were to slit Jake's throat now," his sword arm lashes out, and the tip of the blade rests gently against Jake's neck, "and he died, the game would bring him back whole."

Jake chuckles, the metal sliding on his skin as his throat vibrates. "Great minds, Strider," he says. "I proposed the same thing to Roxy, but she was unexpectedly bashful about it."

"Of course I was!" Roxy says indignantly. "It was horrible when I had to kill Jane to get her to god tier, and I am not killing one of my friends again!"

"We can't just kill and restart every time one of us gets badly injured," protests Jane.

"Yes, we can," argues Dirk. "It's the most logical thing to do. And not to mention the best thing for the situation we find ourselves in at present. So," he flexes his wrist, turning the sharp point of the blade against Jake's throat, "if you have nothing against my killing you again, English, I suggest we get our asses in gear."

A flash of red, and Dirk is surprised to find the trident pointed at his chest. Jane's usually kind face is twisted with anger, her blue eyes dark. "I have something against it," she says. She pushes the trident, and Dirk can feel each of the three tines press into his breastbone. "People aren't like robots, Dirk. You can't scrap them and replace them with a newer model just because they're broken."

"Hey, gosh, Jane," tries Jake, "it's honestly all fine, I'm okay with—"

"I'm not," she cuts him off. "I started playing this game because _you,_ " she pokes Dirk harder in the chest with the trident, "and Roxy said that it would save us from the Empress and her evil. Well, so far it hasn't really worked, since we seem to be going deeper and deeper into her domain. But I continue trusting you, against my better judgement, because you are my friends. And as my friends, I am not letting you do something incredibly stupid like kill each other again."

Dirk frowns at her, not lowering the sword. She frowns back, her grip on the trident unrelenting. At the corner of his eye, Dirk spots Roxy fidgeting uncomfortably. "Hey, Dirk," she begins, "didn't shades give you a code for something we could make that would help us win more easily? I think we should alchemise that first and then see where we are."

"That's a very sensible idea," agrees Jane. Trident still pointed at his chest, she prompts: "Dirk?" He gives the smallest shrug with one shoulder.

"Sure." He removes his sword from Jake's throat, sheathing it. Jane's shoulders relax, and she lowers her trident.

  


* * *

  


The BAT _Condescension_ houses over a thousand trolls and a similar number of carapace when at full capacity. As the flagship of the Alternian fleet and the pride of the Empire when it comes to efficiency, weaponry and astroengineering, it needs to be diligently maintained and well-stocked. Because of this, a very large amount of the ship is dedicated exclusively to large pieces of machinery, maintenance, and storage. After a few minutes of featureless and endlessly winding maintenance shafts, they reach a hatch in the floor, placed exactly where twofoldApostate told Dirk it would be.

Jane puts her hands on the wheel meant to open the hatch, but she hesitates. "Are you certain – are you a hundred percent sure this is the right thing to do?" she asks Dirk.

 _No, but it definitely beats going back,_ Dirk thinks, but he isn't willing to concede to the fact that there is even a moment of the game he doesn't have under control. "It's the consensus," he says, "and I have always been a firm advocate of democracy." Jane's smile is slightly sour, but she turns the wheel nonetheless. Dirk ask himself what she thinks about how close Jake is getting to him, and if she watches the way he flies right next to Dirk with their shoulders touching, even if there is plenty of room in the shaft. He wonders if she notices the way Jake's hand goes to take hold of his whenever they're close. If there is any animosity that she may be feeling, she does her best not to show it.

There is a barely audible hiss as the hatch is released. As Jane rests it against the wall, they all back away from the opening, expecting a barrage of weapon fire, but the only thing that hits them is the slight smell of chemically filtered air, freshening up the stale atmosphere of the maintenance shaft. Roxy gives Jane a questioning look, and when she nods curtly, Roxy wields her rifle and drops down through the hatch, landing smoothly on the floor below. Dirk watches her straighten up and do a full turn around, her rifle resting against her shoulder and ready to fire. She tenses suddenly, bracing her feet against the floor and looking as if she is about to shoot, but then she laughs nervously, and lowers the weapon. She looks up, her eyes meeting Dirk's, and she waves.

"All clear!" she announces.

"What was that you were pointing your gun at, then?" asks Dirk, even as he gets ready to jump down to her.

"Come and have a look for yourself."

"Go on then, Strider, we're next," says Jake, nudging him gently with his elbow. His arm goes around Dirk's shoulders and Dirk's arm goes around Jake's waist, and he floats them down into the storage room, Jake leaning half of his weight on him once their feet are on the ground. Jane lands next to them seconds after.

The room looks exactly like Dirk expected it to: full of sealed crates and boxes with troll writing on them, rolls of rope and tarpaulin, shelves stacked with cylindrical canisters and yet more boxes, and a group of imperial drones lined against the furthest wall.

They're over seven feet tall, the chitin covering them red like the logo of Crockercorp, and their hulking arms could crush them to a pulp in seconds. They aren't the robotic ones that the Batterwitch has been using on planet: these have a definite organic feel to them. His blood runs cold.

And then he realises they aren't moving. Their eyes aren't even open: they're just stood there in two neat rows, like toys put away on a shelf until the next play hour. They're probably there to be used as templates for the robotic culling drones.

"Roxy," says Jane, carefully. "What are those things?" The three of them are all frozen on the spot, gripping their weapons tightly. Roxy tuts.

"Imperial drones, but don't worry, they're completely harmless now, I checked," she says.

"You checked?" Dirk can't keep the indignation out of his voice. "Need I remind you—"

"Don't be such a doubting Thomas," reproaches Roxy, and Dirk watches with horror as she walks over to the drones and goes on tiptoe to tap the closest one on the chest. Her knuckles knock against the chitin, but the drone, to Dirk's immeasurable relief, doesn't stir. "See?" says Roxy, turning to them. "As comatose as Dirk's heterosexuality."

"How can you know that for sure?" demands Dirk.

"I'm very happy you asked, Dirk. First of all, it's so painfully obvious in the way that you haven't openly expressed having the hots for a girl as sexy as this," says Roxy, pointing at herself in one sweeping motion. "And then, it's also because your heart beats so hard for a certain—"

"You know I was referring to the drones," says Dirk before she has the chance to finish. Roxy looks affronted about being interrupted, but her lips curl into a smug grin nonetheless. Dirk is grateful that he has his face in check enough not to start blushing, and that he is less conspicuous about his romantic interests than the average teenager. The fact that Roxy noticed it isn't surprising: even if he didn't tell her most things, she is as sharp as a tack and she would have inevitably figured it out for herself.

"As the number one teen dreamboat in the revered science of ectobiology, which has nothing to do with drones but a lot to do with biology," she says, "I can tell you that these drones are in diapause."

"They're asleep," says Jake.

"Gold star, Mr English!" beams Roxy. "And more good news: they aren't going to wake up until needed, which won't be for a long time, since both Alternia and Earth have been destroyed and there's nothing for them to do. Nobody to bully for genetic material or to frighten into submission."

"Is that so," says Dirk. Roxy nods proudly. "What about terminating their diapause through external stimuli? Like, I don't know, a human girl tapping them on the chest?" She frowns, and takes a careful step away from the drones.

"I'm not saying you're right," she says, "but bothering them probably isn't a good idea."

"Let's get away and find the alchemiter," volunteers Jane. "Even if they are asleep, they're still giving me the heebie-jeebies and I'd much rather be very far away from them."

They find the alchemiter squeezed away in a corner of the storage room, between a tall stack of crates and a shelf full of colourful boxes of something that bizarrely reminds Dirk of Fruit Gushers. Jane opens one to discover something almost entirely unlike Gushers: sweets rolled in fine sugar in various bright colours in the shape of larvae. It's only when Jake translates the ingredients on the back that they realise the sweets are actually what they look like – troll grubs no older than a few days. The description, as far as Jake interprets it, promises 'an authentic taste, soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside'. Jane puts the box back down, looking slightly green in the face.

Dirk opens the text file with the code, bringing it up on his glasses. He is about to put it into the punch designix built into the alchemiter, when Roxy interrupts him. "You didn't say how you got the code," she says.

"I didn't, the AR did. He hacked into the ship's databases and found it, so I thought we might as well try it out," lies Dirk. The code given to him by twofoldApostate is punched into the card, and the designix spits it out. The captcha on the other side of the card reads _BY38LoSe_ , and Dirk wastes no time in using the card with the totem lathe.

"Did he?" He can't see Roxy's face, being too busy with moving the red cruxite dowel onto the alchemiter's pedestal, but she doesn't sound unconvinced enough for him to get worried. "I'll have to ask him how he got past the firewall." Dirk gives a noncommittal shrug, and scans the dowel.

The item made from the dowel is identified by the game as The Spine of Osiris. Dirk picks it up from the pedestal, confused as to what its purpose is meant to be. It's about sixteen inches long, wide at the top and narrowing at the bottom, and appears to be made out of a reasonably light, gold-plated metal, similar in weight to the kind of alloy Dirk would use to build robotic limbs for Sawtooth. The top ends in a socket, and the decoration around the edge makes Dirk think of a roulette wheel, except the colours are purple, black, yellow and red. He weighs it in his hands and then realises what it reminds him of. He turns towards Jake, who is sitting on a large plastic box, resting his leg.

"Jake."

"Strider?"

Dirk goes down on one knee in front of him, pressing the wider end of the Spine to the bandaged stump of Jake's right leg. He isn't the least bit surprised when the stump fits perfectly into the socket. Jake's mouth widens in astonishment, and then in pain as what Dirk thought was a decorative strip starts flashing and changing colour, and he has to let go of the metal because it's become too hot to touch. Jake yells, trying to pull his leg out, but the harder he yanks at the thing, the more pain it seems to cause him. This close, Dirk can almost feel the metal radiating heat, so he grabs at Jake's hands, moving them away and holding them tightly in his so that he doesn't burn himself.

"What did you do!" Jane shouts, running to Jake's side. "Get it off!"

"I've got it under control," Dirk snaps, not sparing her a glance. "Stay out of this, Jane. I'm fixing it." He focuses his attention on Jake, who is struggling to throw his hands off, but Dirk holds on tighter. "Jake," he says brusquely, "listen to me." He doesn't seem to want to, so Dirk squeezes his wrists enough to hurt, and it's only then that Jake looks at him, frowning even through the pain. "You're a gun-slinging hero; you are not letting something like this deter you from your goal. Let it do its work and it'll help you."

"I don't trust it," argues Jake, "I can feel it in my blood! I am not using some invasive alien hogwash! Just get it the bloody hell off!"

"You are not going to get anywhere with just one leg," says Dirk, frowning. "The principle that nature functions on, the principle that this game functions on, is the survival of the fittest. If you are agile enough to fight and kill, you are destined to win. If you are missing a leg and refusing help when it's so plainly offered to you, then you will end up being crushed and mixed into one of the Batterwitch's cakes. You're made of stronger stuff than this."

Jake stops struggling then, pride clearly wounded, and lowers his arms, settling instead on biting down on his lower lip to try and distract himself from the pain, his buck teeth prominent. "I'm not going to disappoint you," he says, carding his fingers together with Dirk's and holding tightly onto his hand. Jane hugs his shoulders, and Roxy is at his other side, rubbing soothing circles into his back. Dirk looks at the peg leg, hoping that he has it right. They all stand and wait for a tense minute until the colours around the edge of the leg stop changing, and Dirk can see in the curve of Jake's shoulders that he's started to relax, even as his hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat. The metal must be cooling down. He helps Jake stand up, and the leg makes a clunk against the floor as he takes a tentative step forward, still supporting himself on Dirk.

"That was the stupidest, most dangerous thing you've ever done," says Roxy as Jake takes deep breaths, wiping the sweat from his face.

"And the list of stupid and dangerous things you've done is quite extensive," agrees Jane.

"You're welcome," says Dirk, giving them both a curt nod. At his side, Jake's mouth cracks into a face-splitting grin as he takes another few steps forwards, each second step accentuated with a soft _clunk_. He winces a little every time he leans his weight on the peg leg, and Dirk can see that although the flesh around it has mostly healed, the skin still looks tender and red, like after a burn.

"We need to secure the entrances to this place to make sure nobody gets in," says Jake. "I volunteer! This blasted thing needs getting properly used to, and what better option than to walk through the pain." His face is full of an almost sickening optimism as he takes his arm from around Dirk's shoulders and tries to stand on his own, gritting his teeth. Dirk doesn't move to stop him, glad that Jake has taken initiative. Roxy, on the other hand, moves forward and takes hold of Jake's hand.

"Walkies, huh?" she says. "I'll come with you, to make sure you're okay." She shoots Dirk one last reproachful look before they disappear around a tall stack of canisters and out of sight.

Dirk sits cross-legged on the floor, back resting against the side of the shelf with the sugar grub boxes, his sword laid out in front of him. Jane perches on the box where Jake sat, scratching her elbow and looking off to the side. Dirk decaptchalogues a box of banana Twinkies. They are a limited edition and long ago discontinued, but Twinkies can survive the apocalypse: and have done, twice. Dirk found a large cardboard box of the things tucked away in a corner of his apartment, buried under a pile of first pressing Venny Outrageous 7" EPs. There may as well have been a flashing neon sign saying _This is from your big bro_ stuck to the box for the kind of message it sent. When Dirk first tried one, they were absolutely disgusting. Although the taste of Twinkies doesn't mature with age, he'd learned to love them after a steady diet of accidentally appearified pumpkin, and always kept a pack of them in his sylladex as a symbolic sign of dissent, and because they turned out to be horrifically tasty once you got past the fact that they had zero natural ingredients. 

He rips the packet open and tosses one to Jane. Lil' Cal is expelled out of his sylladex at the same time as the Twinkies, somehow, so Dirk places the puppet into a sitting position on the floor next to him.

Jane warily regards the little individually wrapped piece of melt-in-your-mouth diabetes in her hand, while Dirk doesn't hesitate to rip his open and sink his teeth into it, enjoying the immediate burst of artificial flavouring on his tongue.

"Don't let something as bygone and irrelevant as brand loyalty perpetuate your hunger," he tells her after swallowing that first bite. "I'm personally getting a kick out of eating a Hostess product in the proverbial heart of Crockercorp. I almost wish I could see her face, but I'll have to settle for picturing her anger and indignation with my mind's eye." Jane carefully tears open the plastic wrapper, and takes a tentative bite. She chews slowly, swallows, and then takes a much bigger bite.

"This is surprisingly tasty," she comments. Dirk can't help a smirk as she scoops the filling out with her finger and licks it off.

"Few things are as palatable as subversion," he says.

There is a rush of air as Roxy lands between them. "Lieutenant Lalonde reporting," she says, saluting crookedly at Jane. "All entrances and exits have been secured, ma'am, sir, and Ensign English is—is that a _Twinkie?_ " Her voice goes higher with astonishment as she sees the now empty wrapper in Jane's hand. She spins around to face Dirk and grabs the box out of his lap, extracting two cakes out of it and tossing it back to him, quick as a flash.

"You were saying?" he asks, eyebrows raised in amusement. She wrenches her eyes from the Twinkies she's holding, although it looks like it takes effort.

"Basically, everything's hunky dory, except Jake's leg needs a bit more exercise, so I'm going to go help him with that. Right after we've eaten these beautiful, beautiful cavity makers," she says, pressing the two cakes gently to her chest like a pair of long-lost mutant kittens.

"Come back after you're done," says Dirk. "I don't like us splitting up for too long." She salutes again, sticking her tongue out at him, and kicks off into the air to fly back to Jake.

"Sometimes I wonder at your methods, Dirk," says Jane after Roxy is well out of earshot. "They're very..." She trails off, and scratches her elbow again, pulling at the fabric of her sleeve.

"Machiavellian?"

The corners of her mouth quirk upwards. "That wasn't really the word I was looking for, but you do have a way of scheming your way into things, and a lack of scruples if you think that the situation doesn't beg for any."

"I've never heard it put so eloquently. Roxy usually just calls me an asshat," Dirk shrugs. He focuses his eyes on Jane, examining the way she holds herself - her posture is perfect, while his shoulders are in a slouch he can never shake. She makes a great figurehead for Dirk's clandestine puppeteering, because she is a good friendleader. The thing is, she doesn't even have to try: everyone trusts her, and everyone likes her. He can understand why the Batterwitch would want her. "Do you regret your decision of letting me be the one to pull the strings of the fucked up pantomime that's this session?" he asks.

Jane hesitates before answering, chewing on her lip once or twice before she speaks. "I don't regret my decision, no. I deplore some of yours, however." She stops fiddling with her god tier pyjamas and looks right at him, her expression uncomfortable, but determined. "You're cold-hearted, controlling, and you only accept compromise when the alternative threatens to blow the allegiance of your team to smithereens."

"That's what a leader does, Jane," he says calmly. "He makes the decisions necessary to benefit the entirety of the team rather than its individual members. Synergy remains the key to this session being a success. Our supplies of democracy are being depleted the longer you question this and dawdle and postpone the final battle. I want to get everyone to that end game door, and I want to see the Batterwitch dead at my feet. At this point in the game, friendleading just doesn't cut the mustard."

Jane frowns lightly. "I agree that it's better you are the leader. I wouldn't have the kind of gumption needed to handle the situation the way you do. I'm not attacking you, Dirk."

"You covered that when I wanted to kill Jake," he says in an attempt at a turn to the humorous. It doesn't work: Jane shakes her head at him scoldingly, and the conversation dies. As if on cue, Pesterchum flashes on Dirk's shades.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: Sorry to interrupt… whatever it is that you and Jane are having.  
TT: Yeah, what is it?   
TT: Well done on the leg. I thought that was a great call on your part.   
TT: I can tell when you're being sarcastic, you know. He looks fine, and he's walking. It sure beats your harebrained idea, anyway.  
TT: Are you done auditioning for the remake of "2001: A Space Odyssey" now?  
TT: No need to get trigger happy, Broba Fett.   
TT: I appreciate you ironically getting the movie wrong. I'm trying to talk to Jane, what do you want?   
TT: I've been talking to the ship's computer.   
TT: I know, we've covered that. Have you learned anything new?   
TT: Nothing immediately helpful, but I thought you might find it interesting. The Helmsman gave me a whole file on the Prospit dreamers that Dersite intelligence and the Batterwitch's spies have gathered over the years. And, as it turns out, game sessions.  
TT: Both the game sessions.  
TT: He gave you that willingly? What about his behavioural blocks?   
TT: Yeah, about that. I did get the files, but they were fragmented as all fuck and I only finished piecing them together just now. Immediately after he sent them to me, he started babbling incoherently, typed out about five pages of absolute gibberish in the space of eight seconds, and the disconnected.  
TT: I don't think I'll be hearing from him for a while.  
TT: Fuck, that's horrifying. I'd never do that to anything sentient.   
TT: Thanks for passing the basic test for a decent human being. Have this.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] sent timaeusTestified [TT] the file "incesthighway.doc" --

TT: Is that like "Mulholland Drive", but with siblings instead of lesbians?   
TT: Think of it as "Who Not To Stick Your Dick Into: The Beginner's Guide".   
TT: Sometimes I remember you're thirteen and then I am so fucking proud of myself. 

Dirk opens the file. It's far shorter than he imagined, definitely due to how corrupt it was when the auto-responder got it. It mostly contains all the information he acquired himself during his eventful career as a Dersite spy, although the intention the collectors of this data had in mind is far less benevolent than his was. There are no names of the dreamers, just their titles: the Maid and the Page, and the Witch and the Heir. Somehow, whoever collected this seems to have got information on the Prospit dreamers from both the game sessions. Apart from the class titles of the dreamers, no data remains in the file from the other session, so Dirk is puzzled as to why the AR would even bother sending him this. And then he spots it, at the very end of the document, highlighted in orange, and his eyes widen in astonishment. Pesterchum flashes.

TT: Told you.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

There's long-winded ectobiological and time travel data, but Dirk knows enough about both to be able to figure out that the Heir and the Witch were created from the same ectoslime, and that they are what the file lists as the ancestors of the Maid and the Page respectively. He closes the file and faces Jane, who is worrying at a seam on her sleeve.

"The AR just told me something really interesting," he says, making her look up. "He's been digging through the files in the ship's databases and he's found some intel on the Prospit dreamers," he explains.

"What kind?"

"It's really interesting, actually, because it only further proves how much the four of us are connected and the inevitability of us playing the game. I've told you about mine and Rox's parents, right?"

Jane nods. "You did take your sweet time with it, though!" she reproaches. "If Jake hadn't mentioned the fact that you and Roxy were four hundred years apart from your biological mum and dad, I would probably never have known!"

"Yeah, well," shrugs Dirk, "it's not the easiest thing to believe, and you're hardly very trusting. Nothing personal."

"I'm trusting you now," she says. "So what did he find out?"

"Well, Rox and me are related because our parents were related, which I found out after a fucking atrocious trip to the Dersite archives." He wrinkles his nose. "Those idiots just piled everything up in a basement, it's a wonder I ever found anything in the place. What hadn't been eaten by rats was completely ruined by damp. It's some recondite ectobiology shit which Lalonde could explain better, but what it boils down to is that we're basically like brother and sister, right?" He doesn't wait for her to answer, and continues: "Right. Turns out, they did some digging of their own on Prospit, and found stuff out about you and Jake, and the Prospit players from the other session."

Usually when they're talking online, Jane doesn't interrupt Dirk's monologues, but this time she tenses, letting go of the fabric of her sleeve which she's been pulling on. "What about Jake and me?" she asks.

"Turns out it's the same deal," he says. "The files the AR found don't name the other dreamers, but they do say that they were expectorated out of the same slurry, so they're ectosiblings too. And it also says that they are your ancestors." He sees Jane's face fall as she beings to understand what he's saying, but he plunges on. "Which, if we think back to Rox and me, would make Jake and you brother and sister as well." 

"I see," Jane says, hunching her shoulders. "Usually, I would say that you were telling me this as an attempt to discourage me, but you _did_ promise that you would stop being an insufferable asshole," she says slowly. She looks at Dirk to check his expression, but it reveals nothing, so she looks back down at her lap. 

"So," tries Dirk, "are you going to tell him?"

"Tell him what?" Jane looks up, slight confusion registering on her face.

"That you're related. I mean," he explains, "I know that you… really like him too, and he's been showing increasing signs of fondness towards me, so I figured that it must be difficult for you to see that. I thought telling you all of this may get rid of any feelings of jealousy you may have, seeing as it's still taboo to engage in any kind of non-platonic relationship with your own brother."

"Well that doesn't prevent Roxy from liking you, now does it?" Jane snaps.

Dirk is taken aback by this. He and Roxy have been increasingly protective over one another over the years, pretty much ever since they'd known of each other's existence, and even before they knew they were destined to play the game together. They always have each other's back and they are involved, neck deep, in each other's issues. Maybe it's due to the fact that their ancestors were birthed from the same ectobiological slime, but Dirk is willing to bet a substantial portion of his collection of _Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff_ memorabilia on the fact that he understands Roxy better than she understands herself. The fact that it goes the same way when flipped turnways fills him with an equal dose of apprehension and contentment. Roxy mentioned them getting together, once or twice or a couple of times, but Dirk never thought it to be out of anything other than her desire for companionship and determination to fuck the Batterwitch's shit up by all means available. Human reproduction used to be heavily controlled by legislation and nearly non-existent, and aside from Dirk and Roxy, so were the humans. 

All of this seems like another lifetime, though. To Dirk, _homosexual_ is an entirely irrelevant and outdated term, and thus one he would never apply to himself. He doesn't care for labels, and he doesn't care for gender when it comes to his romantic preferences. Roxy, on the other hand, clearly doesn't care for ectobiology, something Dirk can appreciate purely for the irony.

"Let's just agree," he hazards, "that our quartet is a melting pot of teenage hormones and barely contained sexual frustration, and leave it at that."

"What about you and Jake?" Jane wants to know, unwilling to drop a conversation topic even when it is making them both uncomfortable. "When are you going to tell him? We're nearly at the end. Are you going to let him die without offering any closure on this cat and mouse game that you've been playing since we entered the medium?"

Dirk rests his elbows on his knees, steepling his fingers and looking over them at Jane. "I am not going to let him die. I am not going to let anyone die."

"How do you know that won't happen? Perhaps we aren't meant to live. Perhaps winning the game means dying for good. This is basically a suicide mission," she says, echoing Dirk's own doubts. "It would be rather naive of us to think that we aren't walking into a trap. Does it not strike you as odd that we haven't been attacked in so long?"

"Of course it does," he agrees. "She has a plan for us."

"And we're playing right into her hands." Jane leans forwards, hands braced on the edge of the box. "Did the auto-responder really hack the code for the leg from the ship's systems, Dirk? And the info about the Prospit dreamers?" He keeps his mouth shut and his face dispassionate. She sighs. "Alright, maybe it's best that I don't know the truth for now. But I'm worried about Jake. I mean, I'm worried about all of us, but he worries me the most," she adds. "Haven't you noticed how odd he's been lately?"

"I'm very interested to hear your super-sleuth take on this," Dirk says. Jane pauses, as if unsure whether he's trying to patronise her, but eventually her desire to share her doubts with him wins.

"It's the way he can be so cold and ruthless sometimes, not at all like the Jake I know," she says. "You watch him a lot, and I know you've seen it too." Dirk doesn't even try and dispute this. Of course she'd pick up on the symptoms if she suffers from the same illness. "It started when he killed Roxy, there was nothing on his face. No regret, fear, or any other emotion, and it chilled me to the bone. He snaps. He wants to weasel his way through the game without any integrity. He broke that troll's jaw." She hunches forwards, as if protecting herself from a sudden gust of cold wind. "I've never seen, I had no idea he was _that_ strong, that's hardly human strength at all." Dirk remembers the wink Jake gave him, and the feeling that pooled in his gut, excitement tinged heavily with uneasiness. "And then he does things like cuddle up with Lil' Cal while he sleeps and I feel absolutely horrendous for every doubt I might have had about him." She bows her head, contrite.

"Maybe you aren't entirely off the mark," Dirk says carefully. She looks up, eyebrows raised, encouraging him to go on. He shakes his head. "I could be completely wrong here, since I was heavily concussed at the time and the entire thing may well have been a consequence of forcefully exerted rotational forces in my diencephalon," Jane's hoot of a laugh interrupts him, and he offers a grin, continuing, "but something pretty fucking weird happened at the high court just before I lost consciousness." He tells Jane about what he saw: how the huge subjugglator babbled about the holy ruckus, the Vast Honk and all that other alien bullshit, and about the skull he had painted on Jake's face with all of their blood. Jane listens intently, eyes wide.

"I didn't see any blood on Jake's face," is all she says after he's done.

"Roxy probably wiped it off after she finished patching him up."

Jane appears to consider this for a moment, and then: "Why are you telling me this?"

"You were the one perceptive enough to notice everything else. And I said I would take your advice and stop being an asshole," he says matter-of-factly. "You're one of my best friends." 

"So what do you suggest we do?"

"What we planned to do from the beginning," he replies. "Kill Jack. Meet up with the chumps from the other session and show them the Batterwitch's head on a platter, so that they know we aren't to be fucked with. In short, we fuck shit up, we win."

"And if that fails, we get drunk, make out, and die happy." Jane's head snaps towards the direction of Roxy's voice so fast that Dirk is sure she's risking neck injury. He raises his eyebrows as Roxy giggles and Jake chuckles: they're back, and Jake seems much surer on his feet than before. He limps still, but there's far less hesitation to his movements, and even though an injury that severe should by no means heal that fast, Dirk is not looking that particular gift horse in the mouth.

"Somehow, I don't think the game would deem dying in the middle of a make-out session as a particularly godly death," says Dirk, leaning back and stretching his legs in front of him.

"I don't know, I think that showing someone how much you like them is a pretty heroic thing to do," argues Roxy, and Dirk only sees the short glance she throws in Jane's direction because he looks for it. Then his eyes land on Jake, and he catches him looking right back. Dirk knows his shades offer protection and that there is no way that Jake can tell where he's looking from this distance, since Dirk is still facing towards Roxy, but he can sense that Jake isn't looking at the shades. Jake blinks, and one of his eyes shines orange, the other red. Dirk thinks of pool balls and the terror barely registers in his gut before Jake blinks again and his eyes slide away from Dirk's, back to their usual green.

"Wasn't Lil' Cal sitting there just a second ago?" Jane points to the spot next to Dirk, which he now realises is entirely puppet-free.

He's on his feet in seconds, standing up so quickly he forgets himself and his heels momentarily lift off the ground. "Time's up," he says, sword in hand. Jane jumps down from the crate, wielding her trident as Roxy and Jake simultaneously draw their guns.

"Any time you want to tell us what's happening, Dirk," hisses Roxy.

"You're the number one teen dreamboat ectobiologist," responds Dirk, priding himself on the fact that his voice isn't shaking even as the sounds of claws scratching against warehouse flooring grows ever closer. "Couldn't you tell us that they were in the last stage of diapause?"

All they have time for is panic before the newly awoken drones advance on them from all sides. Dirk watches an enormous clawed hand grab Roxy around the waist and lift her off the ground. The drone grips her head with its other hand, the talons digging into her cheeks, and he can't hear the snap when it twists Roxy's neck only because it is deafened by the screech of the drone behind him. The sound is like someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard, and it sends goosebumps down his spine. He sees Jake fire a barrage of shots at a third drone, and the bullets ricochet against the chitin.

Dirk flies into the air, somersaulting onto the drone's chest, his feet bracing against the sharp jut of its mid-section. He looks for the weak spot in the exoskeleton, the break in the shell between the chin and neck where he knows they're easiest to wound because he's fought their robotic counterparts before. The drone bows its head. Its breath is like carrion in the shimmering heat of summer, the fork painted on the chitin white as the wing of a seagull.

The drone's head twitches just as Dirk plunges the sword into its weak spot. Its horns tear across his shoulder and rip through his chest. His grip on the sword loosens, and he feels himself falling to the floor.

The last thing Dirk sees before death is Lil' Cal's face, perched on the shoulder of the drone and grinning amicably down at him.


	5. Katabasis

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] at 10:25 opened private bulletin board FOETOR HEPATICUS. --

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] at 10:25 opened memo on board FOETOR HEPATICUS. --

TT: We're in what I would tentatively refer to as a real fucking pickle right now.  
TT: It would be advisable that you hurried up and finished being useless layabouts so we can all get out of here. Preferably while kicking some grey alien ass and also taking some exotic names, the pronunciation of which few can agree on.  
TT: Not that you really have a choice in the matter. We've seen that crying and stomping your feet doesn't do anything except make the blood flow a bit faster to your extremities.  
TT: Although why you'd need empirical evidence for something as embarrassingly basic as that is beyond me, but hey, what do I know. I'm a pair of sunglasses.  
TT: You're gods now, and that means that it's up to you, by default. Everything is up to you. Not that you've been doing a commendable job of things so far.  
TT: Despite the fact that the only hope we've ever had has been a fool's hope, I still like clinging to it. Maybe it's a bug in my system that's causing this sense of loyalty.  
TT: Note to self: run diagnostics check for malware.  
TT: You know, I've always said that having a lifespan was the bane of organic matter, and here you are, indefatigably proving me right. Even though you're supposed to be deities now, and as a result one would think you'd have risen above mortality.  
TT: That was a joke. Ha ha.

\-- golgothasTerror [GT] is offline --  
\-- gutsyGumshoe [GG] is offline --  
\-- timaeusTestified [TT] is offline --  
\-- tipsyGnostalgic [TG] is offline --

TT: Sometimes I wonder why I bother. You're a terrible audience.

\-- TT closed memo. --

  


* * *

  


Resurrection is the opposite of dying in the most literal way, so healing is as painful as getting injured. The process is gradual: you aren't enveloped in an ethereal glow which removes all wounds. Bones grow back, tendons stitch themselves up, muscles bind back together, skin closes over cuts and bruises pale and disappear. It's like getting punched, stabbed, and slashed all over again, in reverse. 

Dirk comes back to life breathing in cotton and pomegranate. He opens his eyes, face to face with Roxy's pyjamas, his nose pressing into the crook of her shoulder. His hand is on the floor, his shades lying in his palm. Roxy's arms are pressing against his back, holding him close. He can see the wall she's leaning against, red like almost every other wall on the ship. He has no idea where they are.

He stirs, but Roxy squeezes him tighter, keeping him in place. "Don't move," she whispers right next to his ear, her breath warm on his exposed neck. He complies, stilling instantly. So they're all alive again, and they're still in trouble. No surprises there. The phantom pains from where the drone gored him are still there, although the warmth coming from Roxy means that they are nothing more than a gentle throb across his chest, and they will go away soon.

He thinks of everything he wants to ask her, and settles on: "Is everyone alive?" He doesn't like the pause following his question.

"Yeah," says Roxy eventually.

"But?"

"We don't know where Jake is."

"He wasn't here when we woke up," he hears Jane softly say, and feels her fingers skate across his free hand. Her voice sounds strained, like she's been crying. She takes his hand in hers, the pad of her thumb brushing against the leather of his glove.

Dirk tries to think. He can't see anything further than Roxy's pyjamas and the wall. He can't move because she told him not to, and he trusts Roxy at least twice as far as he can throw her. The smell is different here than on the rest of the ship. As always, there is the underlying whiff of chemical filtration which is keeping the air fresh and free of carbon monoxide and other noxious gases, but there is something else. 

He doesn't notice it at first because he's so used to it, having had it course through the open windows of his apartment all his life, along with the occasional gull, but then he picks it up: it's the distinct smell of the sea. Dirk doesn't need to recognise the slight tyrian quality to the lighting around them to have his suspicions confirmed. They have descended to the atrium of the heart of the _Condescension_. They are prisoners of the Batterwitch, and the reason Roxy told him not to move must be because someone is here with them, probably guarding their cell. And it is only their patience – or more likely, the Condesce's order – that's keeping them alive. 

Their sylladices have most definitely been emptied, but for some reason they haven't taken Dirk's glasses. Either they don't know about the auto-responder, or they don't think that it is enough of a threat to be confiscated. He hopes it's the former: and as to the latter, he is eager to show them how wrong they are. 

"He awake yet?" a voice barks. Dirk doesn't recognise it, but it sounds cantankerous enough for him to be able to guess who it belongs to.

"No," says Roxy, the heel of her palm pressing into Dirk's back, just in case he should get any stupid ideas like moving. 

"He better hurry up. The Condescension isn't very patient, and neither am I." There is a pause, and when their jailor speaks again, the sound is more distinct. He must have moved closer. "You sure you're not lying to me, Rogue? You wouldn't like to be lying to me." 

"I'm as honest as your chitin is black, Jack Noir. It must be really cosy to bully me from the other side of a force field with two drones flanking you like that. Things would be much different if that wasn't the case." What Roxy is saying isn't simply meant to get a rise. She's describing the surroundings for Dirk's benefit, although he isn't quite sure to what end. Even if they are gods, they can't go through a force field. If they do somehow get on the other side of it and kill Noir, there would still be the drones to contend with, and without their strife specibi Dirk isn't willing to risk their chances. Then it occurs to him that Roxy still has her fistkind abstratus, and he understands what she is trying to do.

"Are you threatening me?" asks Jack.

"Nope," Roxy says cheerfully, "just calling you a coward. I mean," she goes on, "look at you. You're supposed to be the Arch-Agent of Derse, and you need a pair of drones _and_ a force field to protect you from a bunch of unarmed kids?" She clicks her tongue. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that the Empress doesn't really think you're the cat's pyjamas."

"Then why would she give me this _extremely important_ job of guarding you three brats?" The sneering contempt in his voice is obvious. 

"Probably because it's somewhere she can keep an eye on you," Jane chimes in. "Isn't that what that fenestrated wall is for?" Dirk feels a rush of pride for the both of them. 

"It's not even turned on!" Jack objects. 

"Maybe not from your end," says Roxy, the self-proclaimed expert in the esoteric science of dark fenestrology. 

"I've just about had enough of your shit. Let's see how snarky you are without a tongue," growls Jack. There is a click, like a switchblade being opened – probably the same knife that was used to try and kill Jane's dream self. Or, knowing Jack's love for all things sharp, it's one of a numerous collection. Dirk feels Roxy tense and he knows what it means. Jack has lowered the force field and entered their cell.

Dirk's reaction is almost instantaneous. His hand clenches around his shades, and he uses his free hand to brace against the floor, pushing himself off Roxy. He stands up, and kicks off into the air. He sees him on the ground, Jack Noir, a fairly short carapace, his chitin black like his bureaucrat's uniform and his blade, his eyes glowing white. Jack bares his teeth in a snarl and throws his knife, aiming it at Dirk's heart. 

The knife whizzes through the air, but Dirk has had too much experience in flash stepping to be caught unawares. He throws himself to the side, his shoulder colliding painfully with the cell wall. The knife misses him entirely, lodging itself into the ceiling. The handle vibrates briefly with the force of the throw. Dirk allows himself a smile, putting his glasses on.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] \--

TT: Welcome back, Brosiris.   
TT: Thanks, it's good to be back.   
TT: Go for the drones, I have a plan.  
TT: Way ahead of you.

He pulls the knife out of the ceiling, flying towards the drones. They look exactly like the ones in the storage room, but their movements are slightly jerky as they stomp towards him, their shells too regular to be chitin. They're robots, just like the ones on Earth. And Dirk knows how to fight robots. 

He flies into the open space between them. The drones turn with precise simultaneity, their huge hands trying to grab at him, but he's faster. He raises his arms to protect his head and turns at an almost vertical angle, flying up. He has to raise his knees to his chest in order to avoid getting trapped between the heads of the drones, which ram into each other with a crash, their hands bumping into each other's chests. They try to separate, but perhaps due to a fault in their code or a system error caused by the force of impact, they each try and turn in the opposite direction. Two of their three sets of horns lock together and jam. 

While they struggle to get free, Dirk slices the throat of one of them, cutting through the wires and sending a shower of sparks across the other's chest. He keeps dragging Jack's knife all the way around the neck until the head completely separates from the torso. The drone's body crashes to the ground, its neck oozing hydraulic fluid. The other drone shakes its head viciously, freeing the severed head of its counterpart from its horns and launching it towards Dirk. He only just dodges it: the horn catches on the end of his pulled down hood, ripping it away. The head soars through the air as Dirk touches down to the ground. It collides with the fenestrated plane behind him, smashing two of the glass panels to pieces. 

Dirk takes a deep breath as the drone lunges towards him, and he does the Heart thing. The drone's arm pauses in mid-air, its fingers harmfully close to Dirk's chest, nearly brushing the Heart symbol on his pyjamas. The drone cocks its head to the side, and its arm drops. Its entire body shudders, and it falls to its knees, the lights of its eyes flickering. Doing the Heart thing on an inorganic enemy is slightly different than attempting to do it on flesh and blood, and Dirk is thankful to Sburb's game mechanics that it still works, slowing down the software, jamming the hardware, and making everything respond about ten times slower than it normally would, although the effect wears off rather quickly. 

"Roxy!" shouts Dirk, keeping his eyes on the drone. "Need you here for a moment!"

"I've got my hands full, Strider!" she shouts back. He looks in the direction of her voice, and sees that she and Jane are still trying to subdue Jack Noir, who seems to have somehow acquired a meat cleaver. He swings it at Roxy, who staggers backwards. He advances, aiming to hit her again, but Jane's hand flies out, catching him on the wrist. The meat cleaver stops inches away from Roxy's cheek. Jack swears, attempting to pull out of Jane's grip, but she pulls the other way, twisting his arm. He yells out in pain, dropping the cleaver. Roxy closes her hand into a fist and punches Jack in the stomach, winding him. Jane grabs the weapon just as Roxy clocks Jack in the chin with her other fist, the second blow knocking him to the ground. 

Dirk doesn't think he will ever get tired of watching Roxy use her fistkind specibus. She's a scientist, and it shows: not only does she pack a punch, but she knows exactly from which angle and _where_ to punch. She is all sinew and muscle, and although her height is often a detriment because she has to fight opponents much bigger and heavier than she is, she knows enough about physics and using momentum and technique to floor whoever she is fighting.

The drone sways in place as it tries to drunkenly get to its feet. "Clock's ticking, Roxy! This thing won't stay this calm for much longer," warns Dirk.

"For the love of fuck, keep your trunk hose on!"

"My what?"

"Those idiotic god tier pyjamas!" 

"They're ironic!"

"I haven't got time to discuss your fashion choices right now!" Roxy says, exasperated. She stands above Jack Noir, who's sitting on the ground and massaging his chin. "Alright, Noir, where are our weapons? If you don't tell me, the next time I hit you, I won't pull my punches."

"I'm not telling you anything," sneers Jack.

"Oh well," says Roxy, and punches him in the face again. He yowls, holding his nose as red blood starts to run from it.

"Are we playing good cop, bad cop here?" Jane asks, carefully regarding the meat cleaver in her hand. 

"Do you want to be the good cop?"

"Not in the slightest," says Jane without pause.

"Then we're playing bad cop, worse cop." Roxy shoves Jack in the chest with her boot, sending him sprawling on the floor. She kneels by Jack's head, pinning his arms down. "I'll need his left arm below the elbow. That cleaver looks pretty sharp, one hit ought to do it," she says. 

"Wait, no!" Jack yells as Jane raises the cleaver. "They're in my war chest!" As he says it, a huge grey chest with spikes down the top and a spade at the front falls next to them. When it hits the floor it springs open, revealing what looks like a year's supply of Licorice Scottie Dogs, another couple of knives, a purple watch, a deck of cards, a crude drawing of the Condesce on the inside of the lid captioned with _glub glub huge witch_ , and sure enough, Dirk's sword, Roxy's rifle, Jane's trident, and Jake's pistols. 

"Great, thank you," Roxy grins down at Jack, "you've been very useful."

The drone shifts, managing to get on one knee. "I'd like some help at any point in this century!" Dirk says, annoyed. 

"In a minute!" Roxy assures him. "Janey, his arm, please." Jane raises the cleaver again.

"I thought you said you'd let me go!" Jack says angrily, his voice tinged with panic.

"I don't think I've ever implied that," argues Roxy. "We need the barcode on your wrist to raise and lower the force field; I've seen you do it. And we can't lock you in the cell if your arm is on the other side, can we?" She shrugs. "Or, I guess we could if the arm wasn't attached to your body."

"Bitches! You fucking bitches!" Jack shouts, kicking his legs furiously. "I will skin you alive, you gravestuffing—"

"Jane!" Roxy shouts above the din as Jane seems to hesitate. "He gave the order to kill Jake on Prospit! He killed you! He wanted to kill you _twice_ , and you're thinking about showing mercy?"

"—and I will feed your skin back to you and set your meatsacks on fire while you choke—"

"He's just a bureaucrat, he's following orders! It's not his fault!" Jane argues.

"Think of Jake!" Roxy implores. "We're wasting time, we need to find Jake!"

"—and I'd kill you again, I'd kill you a thousand times over and I'd fucking _love_ it, Prospitian scum, and your little Dersite girlfriend, too—"

Jane's face turns into a grimace of disgust, and she swings the cleaver, looking away at the last moment. The blade connects with Jack's arm with a crunch, going through the chitin and slicing the limb clean off at the elbow. Jack growls in pain, thrashing wildly and screaming abuse at the both of them. Roxy groans with aggravation, punching him one last time, which knocks him out. In the silence that falls, Dirk can still feel his ears ringing with Jack's shouts.

Roxy grabs the severed arm, which is still dripping blood, and gets to her feet, keeping it well away from her skirt. She walks over to the chest, picks up her rifle and Dirk's katana. Jane drops the cleaver with revulsion, and gets her trident from Jack's chest, along with Jake's pistols, which she captchalogues. As they leave the cell, Roxy touches the wrist of Jack severed arm to a data pad on the wall, and the force field flickers back into existence, trapping the unconscious Arch-Agent behind it. She chucks the arm away, wiping her hand on her skirt.

"I've disabled it," Dirk says when Roxy and Jane get to him and the drone. The thing is now starting to twitch, still trying to stand up. "But I need you to override its attack protocols so I can install new ones. Can you do that?"

"Sure," nods Roxy, handing Dirk his sword. "Just need to borrow your shades for a moment. We work better as a team." She outstretches her hand, beckoning with her fingers. Dirk takes his glasses off, placing them into Roxy's open palm.

"Hurry up, alright? You took your sweet fuckin' time over there," he rebukes.

"Uh huh," she muses, cracking her knuckles. "Knife, please." Dirk hands her Jack's knife, and Roxy flies up to the drone's head. She holds onto one of its lowest horns, just above its eyes, and sits on its grey shoulder plate. "This won't take a moment," she says, and wedges the knife under the plate covering the drone's head. She wiggles the blade about until there's a soft cracking sound. The entire plate comes off, revealing a mess of wiring and integrated circuits along with a miniscule screen with a keypad attached to it. Dirk flies up to join Roxy and inspect the thing himself.

"You need to rewire the—"

"I know," she cuts him off, taking a purple wire out of a red socket and sticking it into a blue one. The drone sways on the spot, and sinks back to its knees entirely, the lights of its eyes flickering off. She raises her eyebrows smugly. "See? I don't need you hovering over my shoulder." Roxy winks at Dirk before slipping on his glasses, handing him the headplate. "Hold onto this for me," she says, pulling the input interface out of the drone's head. It doesn't come out all the way, being attached to the head with a set of tangled wires. She starts silently tapping away at the keyboard.

"What are you doing?" asks Jane.

"Giving it new orders," answers Roxy promptly, not stopping her typing. "Basically, you know the story of the golems, Janey?"

"No?"

"It's from Jewish folklore," explains Dirk. "They were supposed to be fashioned entirely from inanimate matter, like mud or rock. The Talmud says that Adam was initially created as a golem: a brainless shell. And then it was given the Word, and the Gospel According to John says that in the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God—"

"Wow, Strider, I'll knock myself out and fall off this thing and then you'll regret making something interesting that _boring,_ " drawls Roxy. "In any case, putting a hold on the snoozefest," she says, pausing in her typing to unplug and reconnect a few more wires, "all golems had Words in their head, or written on their forehead, that told them what to be. And they couldn't go against them. It's kind of like their genetic code, right? If your DNA says that you have blue eyes, you can't wake up one morning and get brown eyes because you feel like it." She jabs the point of Jack's knife into a plate of interconnected integrated circuits, and a few sparks fly up. "Whoops!" she exclaims. "Anyway, that's what these drones are, if you want a simple explanation. They have a certain set of commands written into their system – like, cull all humans, obey the Baroness, that kind of thing – and they act on them forever. Or until someone erases their commands and writes them new ones."

"So you're giving them a new Word?"

"That's right," nods Roxy, and wraps her hand around a set of wires about as thick as Dirk's wrist, pulling them all out in one go. "I'm nearly done, too!" She giggles suddenly.

"What?" Dirk wants to know.

"Nothing, just something shades said."

"Stop flirting with my auto-responder, Lalonde."

"He started it!"

"I very much doubt that," responds Dirk.

"You never let me have any fun," complains Roxy, hammering a last set of commands into the drone. She replaces the input interface in the drone's head and leans over to Dirk, taking the plate from his hands. She pulls out the purple wire from the blue socket and plugs it back into the red one, and the drone's eyes light up again, shining a vivid pink instead of a cold white. Roxy hands Jack's knife back to Dirk and puts the headplate back on, clicking it into place. The drone stands up, very shakily, and she clings to its horn in order not to slide off.

"Done!" she exclaims proudly. "Can we call it Smarny? It's this fat wizard in _Complacency of the Learned_ —"

"Hang on," interrupts Dirk, floating in front of the drone's face and looking into its blank, glass eyes. "I just told you to override its attack protocols. What did you do?"

"I overrode its attack protocols," she says, shrugging. "Okay, well, and I also installed new ones, because shades said he'd help out and that I type much faster than you do, anyway." 

"Well, thanks," concedes Dirk.

"Any time!" Roxy takes off the glasses, handing them back to Dirk. He slips them on his nose immediately. 

TT: What's the situation?  
TT: I can remotely control this drone to go wherever we want it to and attack our enemies, but I can't access the other drones.  
TT: Good enough for me. Have you tried reaching Jake or locating him?  
TT: Yeah, and he's still offline so I have no way of finding out where he is. I guess you'll have to look for him the old-fashioned way. With your eyes.  
TT: What about my best bro?  
TT: Cal is MIA as well.  
TT: Damn. I guess I'll have to handle this without the little dude's guidance.

"Do we have any idea where we are?" he wants to know. He doesn't think about how the last time he saw Cal, the puppet was on the shoulders of a drone that was trying to kill him.

"No! We both woke up in the cell with Jack and those things outside," says Jane. "We know we're on the tyrian deck, but that's all."

"I could try hacking into the mainframe again and getting the layout?" Roxy suggests.

Dirk shakes his head. "That would draw unwanted attention to the fact that we've broken out. I don't want to let her know that we're free until it's absolutely necessary."

"This is a really, really big ship. There have to be markers and way signs, or else everyone would get lost. You can't run a ship like this without it being easily navigable," muses Jane.

"But we haven't seen any before. Everything was on the layout and programmed in the wall consoles, there weren't any giant signs saying THIS WAY TO THE CONDESCE," says Roxy. "We'll just have to wing it."

"No, this is way too important to rush into headlong. This is Jake we're talking about, not getting grist or solving a billion shitty puzzles," protests Dirk. 

"I agree, we need to find somewhere secluded to plan this thoroughly," says Jane. She flies up to the drone, perching on its other shoulder. She grabs one of its horns with both hands, uneasily regarding the drop to the floor, which Dirk finds ironic seeing as they can all _fly_. "It's not safe to stay here; she could send new drones any time she likes. And then there's that fenestrated plane, it makes me jumpy. I'd really like to get away from anywhere that we could be watched."

"There are security cameras everywhere," Dirk points out.

"We've got a drone that fires missiles and stuff," says Roxy, patting the drone's plating smugly. "And there have to be blind spots. There are always blind spots. And besides, I can always throw a bit of Void in there." She grins, waggling her fingers like a carnival illusionist.

Jane hangs her head, sighing heavily. "There are so many ways in which this can go wrong. I'm sure Dirk's shades could tell us just how many, if we asked him. All the numerous ways in which we could get recaptured and killed!"

"Fine then, here's what I suggest we do," tries Roxy. "We take the drone out of here, and the first door that isn't watched by a camera, the very first door, we get in there, hunker down, and make the drone shoot at anything that tries to get in after us. Anything that isn't bespectacled and buck-toothed, anyway. How does that sound?"

"That sounds like we should already be on our way," replies Dirk. "I'll tell the AR to get it started." He does, and he moves out of the way as the drone takes a lumbering step forward. 

"Hang on, I just remembered something!" shouts Roxy and the drone freezes, its foot raised in an awkward half-step. "You should take Jack's arm with us," she tells Dirk. "There might be other doors we'll need to open with his barcode." Dirk swoops down and picks up the cut off limb, captchaloguing it before it gets a chance to drip on him. Troll blood is one thing: Carapacians bleed the same colour as humans, and it is kind of disconcerting to look at it for too long, even when it's Jack Noir. 

"Aren't you going to sit next to me, Dirk?" drawls Roxy, patting the grey plating she's sitting on. He notices the extremely small amount of space left on the drone's shoulder. He remembers the way his gut twisted when they had first met face to face, and how his heart raced when she first hugged him. She was the first other human being who had ever touched him. But he has no time for feelings or reminiscing, not now. 

"I should go ahead of you and scout, just in case," he says, and notices how Roxy's expression remains unchanged. Roxy Lalonde is the kind of person who, after sixteen years of isolation and living with only mutant cats and Carapacians for company, realised that now that she had her friends with her, she wanted to hold their hands and pat their backs and kiss their cheeks as often as she could. When she was denied this, she would be visibly displeased, every time, until the other party – usually Jake or Jane, because Dirk saw right through her – would accede. This time, she does not even attempt at a pout, and Dirk knows that she is aware that he does not need a quick cuddle to get through this. He needs control. 

"Hold your position until I check that the coast is clear," he says, and Roxy salutes.

"Aye, aye, Sergeant Strider!"

"Whatever happened to Captain Ro-Lal?" asks Jane, leaning forward to look at Roxy past the drone's head.

"She got demoted to Lieutenant on account of alliteration," Roxy grins at her. 

Sparing a last glance at the still thankfully unconscious Jack Noir, Dirk walks over to the door out of the jail, decaptchaloguing Jack's arm. There's a faintly lit panel on the left side of the door, and he brings the barcode on the arm's wrist to it. The panel glows a vivid tyrian, and after a moment's hesitation, the door slides open. He grips his sword in an attack position, but he is met with an empty hallway. Recaptchaloguing the arm, Dirk takes a tentative step out. 

It proves that there was no reason for them to worry about security cameras. There are three of them in the hallway as far as Dirk can see, but they have all been blasted off the wall. Some of the panelling on the walls has been torn out as well, and there are wires spilling out onto the floor, wires isolated with plastic containing metal coils that have been ripped apart, and wires that look like veins. As Dirk looks at them, some pulsate gently, leaking out viscous tyrian liquid which makes a puddle on the tiles. There are deep gouges on the ripped out panels which remind Dirk of claw marks. He sees the unmoving arm of a carapace poking out from one of them and he tries to take the panel off of it, but it doesn't budge. Whatever had originally ripped it off is much stronger than Dirk, so he leaves it be. The carapace is probably crushed to death, anyway. Further along the hallway, a light is smashed and flickering on and off. On the other side, the hallway ends in a set of doors: the metal is bent into a concave shape, like something had been thrown against them with a very large amount of force. Nothing has any chance of passing that way anymore. 

He turns back to the jail, nodding at Roxy and Jane, and the drone walks out to join him, bowing down slightly as it goes through the doorway.

Jane brings a hand to her mouth when she sees the state the hallway is in. "What happened here?"

Dirk bends down and pokes at the puddle on the floor with his fingers. "Whatever did this, it's long gone," he says, the goopy liquid dripping from his fingertips. "This has nearly dried."

"I really don't like this," says Jane.

"Yeah," agrees Dirk, mouth tight. "Let's keep going. First door we spot, we go in."

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering golgothasTerror [GT] \--

TT: Hey.

\-- golgothasTerror [GT] is offline. Messages will be delivered when they sign in. --

TT: Oh, come on, English. You carry at least five computers on you at all times, and simply by sheer probability one of them should still be working and/or not taken by whoever's got you.  
TT: I've told you that he won't answer.  
TT: I know you're worried, because I am too, but what is this? Pestering people you know won't pester you back? You're unravelling.  
TT: From one concerned bro to another, maybe you need to take a break? I know it's hard for you organics to deal with physically and emotionally straining shit like this.  
TT: Unravelling?  
TT: I'm the fucking Gordian knot.  
TT: There is literally no way I can unravel. They've made it a universe-wide competition to try and unwrap that shit, and they can't get past the first couple of strands. They keep tangling their fingers together going, whoa man, this bro is way too composed to unravel with anything my little pathetic attempts can manage to produce.  
TT: My body stays vicious. Dudes be linin' down the block just to watch what I've got.  
TT: Wait, that's a song.  
TT: But you get my point.

\-- timaeusTestified [TT] ceased pestering golgothasTerror [GT] \--

They reach the point in the hallway with the smashed in, flickering light. Broken glass crunches under Dirk's shoes, and the drone's heavy steps pulverise it into dust. There is red blood spattered on the floor as well, but it is crusted over with a film, drying into dark red stains. The trail leads in the direction they are walking in, and as they walk it turns from a spatter into a swipe, like whoever it was that was wounded was dragged along. 

Roxy regards the blood warily. "Do you think that's from the dead Carapacian over there?"

"There's too much of it to come from just one body," says Dirk. 

"It isn't—"

"No," Jane shakes her head, as if she doesn't want Roxy to say what Dirk suspect they're all thinking. "Jake can take care of himself. I'm sure he's fine."

"Yeah," agrees Dirk. He isn't convinced, however. 

They keep going. The hallway seems to stretch on forever, going deeper into the belly of the ship. The security cameras grow sparse, and several of them are knocked down, their lenses smashed. They pass by some doors, but Dirk doesn't manage to open any of them with Jack's barcode: some of the input panels return an error and some, Dirk finds with a growing sense of unease, are entirely inactive. 

"This isn't what I imagined the most important deck on the Batterwitch's ship would look like," comments Roxy as Dirk uselessly flops Jack's wrist against what feels like the thousandth inactive input panel. "It's all busted up. I mean, you'd think she'd take better care of it." She shifts uneasily on the drone's shoulder, grunting with displeasure. "I don't know about you, Janey, but if I don't get to sit on something soft soon, my ass is going to fall off."

Jane sighs heavily. "I have to agree. Dirk," she calls down at him. "Maybe it wouldn't be so amiss if you were to take a more direct approach? We do have a drone that fires," she looks at Roxy, grinning, "missiles and stuff, after all."

"I thought you'd never ask," says Dirk, and punches the input panel. The plastic breaks and reluctantly, the door opens about a third of the way, not nearly enough for the drone to pass through. 

Dirk peers into the space beyond. The room is on the hull side of the ship: there is a large window running down the length of it, showing the empty expanse of space and the friendly twinkle of the stars. There's something that could be an asteroid or a small planet: at this distance, it's no bigger than a ping pong ball and its characteristics are impossible to make out. Following a buzz of electricity, the lights switch themselves on, revealing a wide room populated with small, round tables and chairs. A bar stands in a corner, and behind it multicoloured bottles shine on a set of sleek shelves. The room is altogether deserted. 

Dirk wedges himself into the gap of the door, trying to push it to open wider. Although he puts all his strength into it, the door only budges for the spectacular distance of a few inches. He feels his hood being tugged on, and he chokes slightly as the drone gently picks him up and lifts him out of the way. 

"Let the grown-ups handle this," says Roxy, and with one robotic arm, the drone pushes the door open all the way. It squeezes into the room, Roxy and Jane still riding on its shoulders. Dirk hears Roxy's delighted whistle, which can only mean that she's spotted the well-stocked bar. He stalks into the room after the drone, and kicks the input panel on the other side of the door. It rattles shut behind him. 

Although the chances of anything coming after them through that door are slim unless they somehow manage to break it down, they still position the drone in front of it after Roxy and Jane dismount. The drone raises its arms, and the grey plates on its forearms lift to reveal machine gun barrels, which it points at the door. Dirk remembers the same ones shooting at him when he last fought the drones before entering the medium, on the roof of his apartment with the sea aflame beneath him. Even though this drone is reprogrammed, it still makes his gut clench, and he doesn't sheathe his sword as he walks away from it.

Most of the _Condescension_ that they have seen so far has been monochrome red or duochrome red and grey. From his brief brush with troll culture, it is obvious to Dirk that they aren't exactly a very imaginative society when it comes to fashion and interior decorating, being rather more focused on slaughter and military conquest. The only thing which gave the ship a semblance of variety were the differently coloured lights on the hemospecific decks. This room is different, and Dirk guesses that it's probably because it is both on the deck belonging to the highest rung of the hemospectrum, and because its purpose seems to be something between a canteen and a relaxation room. The prevailing colour scheme is, unsurprisingly, tyrian, but there are traces of violet, purple, and even indigo, haphazardly strewn around the walls in forms of bunting and ribbons with Alternian writing on them. The garishness of the sight reminds him of a hastily abandoned birthday party.

There are no stools, so Roxy jumps up to sit on the bar, kicking her legs and twisting her upper body around to grab a bottle from one of the shelves. It has lime coloured liquid in it, and she sets it down on the bar next to her, before reaching over again and taking a smaller bottle which she sets next to the first one. It is wide at the bottom and top and narrow in the middle, reminding Dirk of a fat figure eight. The liquid in it was cerulean on the shelf, but when Roxy twists the cap open and the alcohol is aerated, the liquid becomes streaked with pink. 

"You are not seriously going through with that, are you?" Jane demands, making Roxy stop with the mouth of the bottle inches away from her lips. She sets it down, affronted.

"I am," says Roxy, taking the bottle with the lime coloured liquid and placing it on the bar in front of Jane. "This one's for you." She turns around to look at the other alcohol at hand, and twists to grab a corkscrew shaped bottle containing liquid of a vivid orange colour. "And that one's for Dirk," she says, placing the bottle on the bar and beckoning Dirk over. He slouches against the bar, still keeping an eye on the drone.

"I don't want to be the Debbie Downer at this hilarious party," he begins, "but I don't think you should drink that. Who knows what kind of weird, fucked up shit alien alcohol can do to your insides."

Roxy's eyebrows skyrocket and disappear into her fringe. "We are gods," she simply says. "Immortal." She pointedly draws out every syllable.

"That doesn't mean you get to have a complete disregard for your own safety! It could be poisoned!" protests Jane. Pensively, Dirk reaches for the orange bottle and weighs it out in his hands. Surprised, he finds that the glass is cold to the touch.

"I've already died twice, and if my third death has to do with some first class alien hooch, I will be the last one you'll hear complaining," says Roxy, shrugging. "And I mean, really, when you're in a dead end situation, you can either sit and cry about it, or you can drink until you forget that it's happening. I'll happily go for the latter; it's worked out great for me so far." In a moment of what Dirk considers to be both unrepentant bravery and unabashed stupidity, she leans her head back and chugs from the bottle.

He holds his breath as she swallows. Roxy's eyes clench shut and she grimaces painfully, and then she holds both hands over her mouth, swaying forward. Dirk is ready to catch her should she pass out – or to move out of the way should she vomit – but she surprises him by doing neither. She shudders with one giant hiccup, and then moves her hands away from her mouth, revealing a rakish grin.

"Tastes a bit like buttercream," she comments, and thrusts the bottle in Jane's hand. Jane holds it at arm's length, regarding it suspiciously. "You need to try this! And I need to sit down on something that is tenderer to my glutes." She pushes herself off the bar and beelines – rather uncertain on her feet already, Dirk notices – towards the large window. The stuff must be stronger than she counted on. Jane rolls her eyes, and follows. Dirk looks at the orange bottle in his own hands. It isn't exactly difficult to figure out that it's his favourite colour, and as such he is naturally drawn to anything he can eat or drink that's any shade of orange. Unlike Roxy, he doesn't have a cast-iron stomach, and he doesn't think that the situation calls for getting blindingly drunk. He captchalogues the bottle: the smaller the amount of alcohol that gets to Roxy at this point, the better.

There is a long, velvet seat under the window, which Roxy now plops onto. She throws her head back contentedly and gives out a sigh of relief. Jane lowers herself down next to her, holding the bottle by its narrow middle and placing it between her knees. Dirk sits on Roxy's other side. The softness of the seat comes as a surprise, and he sinks into the upholstery, managing to turn it into a relaxed slouch before it starts looking like he isn't doing it on purpose. The couch is soft enough to sleep on, especially considering how exhausted Dirk is. He can't recall the last time he slept on something soft. He can't recall the last time he _slept_ and it wasn't brought on by something knocking him unconscious. He isn't afraid of what he'll find in his dreams any longer, because his waking hours can get equally as unnerving. He almost finds himself wishing for the familiarity of the horrorterrors.

"Hey, Lalonde," he says, a thought occurring to him. "You know when you are asleep without a dream self. Do you see them every time?"

Head still resting on the back of the seat, Roxy turns to look at him. "The Noble Circle? Of course."

"Have they said anything interesting to you recently?"

She sits up. "Did they say stuff to you, too?" Dirk nods. Her mouth gapes open in surprise. "I thought I was imagining it! I mean, they were always all about darkness and void, but then they suddenly—" She frowns. "I need another drink." She reaches over to take the bottle for Jane, who gives it up without a fight. 

"What about you, Jane?" asks Dirk as Roxy glugs down the alcohol, which turns an even more vivid pink in the bottle. 

Warily, Jane regards Roxy's throat moving as she swallows. "Yes," she says, "but it sounded more like someone blowing bubbles in a glass of milk rather than speech, most of the time. They used to talk to me about the Furthest Ring before, when my dream self first died, but lately it's just been…" She waves a hand, shrugging. "Gibberish, mostly!"

"They were asking for help," says Roxy, the bottle finally parting ways with her mouth. "They sounded really, really scared and panicked, like cats get around fireworks," she says to Dirk, as if looking for confirmation from him.

"And then there were the four words," he says. 

" _He is already here,_ " all three of them say in the same breath. 

Jane gasps. "I heard that as well! It was about the only thing I understood after they stopped talking and just started to wail." She pauses, biting her lip. "I don't know if Jake heard it too. I never had the chance to ask him." Her face falls. Roxy looks at Dirk glumly, and then hands the bottle to him so she can put her arms around Jane, who immediately responds, pressing close to her.

"Hey, hey," Roxy says, trying to be soothing. "I'm sure he's fine. Like you said, he can take care of himself."

Dirk stares unseeingly at the bottle in his hands, thinking. "What could they mean, though? There is just the sea hag, there isn't anyone else. It doesn't make sense." He watches the colours swirl in the liquid, the pink overtaking the cerulean. He thinks of everything the auto-responder said, and he thinks of Lil' Cal and the drone. "None of it adds up."

Jane slowly pulls away from Roxy. "It does, though," she says, austere. "You said that she has a plan for us, and that's the plan. She made us weak, and then she separated us. She knows we all love Jake." She doesn't even hesitate with the word the way Dirk had. Between them, Roxy keeps quiet, looking from one to the other. "We've been walking into trap after trap, and we've kept going because we knew what our final goal was going to be, and that we were going to reach it together. And now she's got him."

"Don't—" Roxy starts.

"No, Jane's right," says Dirk, sitting up straight and attentive. All the puzzle pieces slot into place with terrifying clarity. "If it wasn't the Condesce personally who had him, he could have broken out and found us. It's the only explanation. She's got him trapped somewhere, and she's watching. And waiting for us to come and get him."

"He's the bait," says Jane, hands balling into fists on her lap.

"She's going to kill us. We're going to die trying to save him. A heroic death," says Dirk, even as he watches Roxy opening her mouth to argue, her eyebrows knotted in disapproval. "She is going to win."

"No!" shouts Roxy, slamming her palms down on the velvet seat. "What's wrong with you two, how can you be like this?" She stands up, and sways heavily on her feet. She grabs onto the back of the nearest chair to hold herself upright until her inner ear remembers what it's supposed to do. "You aren't just giving up because it took you both fucking geniuses this long to realise that we probably won't win. So what!" she shouts. 

"Wait, I know what this is," says Dirk, crossing his arms over his chest. "There is going to be a big speech about how we shouldn't lose hope because it's our strongest weapon, and then you'll make some scathingly accurate parallel to the fact that Jake is the Page of Hope, and probably talk more about the power of love which conquers all. Well," he smirks resentfully, "guess what. We've already lost hope, literally. And love is useless against a culling fork." 

"Don't give me that kind of ridiculous lip, Strider," warns Roxy. She's angrier than he's ever seen her, and at the same time her voice sounds strained, like there's something stuck in her throat. "Our ancestors knew they were going to lose, and they still fought until the very end. They took as many of her goons with them as they could. You used to admire that! You used to think your bro hung the moon! We're doing exactly what they did; I thought you'd be proud!" She swallows thickly, shaking her head. 

"What am I supposed to be proud of here? That we've had it really fuckin' difficult to beat all the minions on this ship despite the fact that we are as powerful as we can get? The fact that we all died at least once, and we haven't even reached the Batterwitch? Or should I be proud of the fact that I am such a great leader that I allowed us to be caught, and that I let her get Jake?" He looks at Roxy coldly. Her mouth is a tight line. She is looking at him like she's seeing him for the first time, and doesn't like what she's looking at. "It's a good thing my bro died four centuries before I was born, so he doesn't have to know how lame I'm being."

A Strider isn't a quitter. But Dirk doesn't feel all that much of a Strider right now. His ancestor fought the Mirthful Executives in the belly of the Dark Carnival. The most impressive thing Dirk has done to spite the Condesce was eat a Hostess product in a storeroom on her ship. 

"You need to give yourself more credit than that," objects Jane. "You were the one who has been the driving force behind all of this from the very beginning. If you hadn't pushed everyone to get to god tier as soon as we possibly could, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all. We would be dead ten times over by now."

"We're not going to kill her," says Roxy. "I'm not brainy like the pair of you, but I realised it as soon as we got into that room with the huge troll, the blood, and the skulls…" She trails off, looking away from them and through the window into space. That seems to give her some amount of initiative, and she continues. "We won't. And we can't even win the game, anyway, since we're pretty much helpless without a Space and Time player. It was stupid and arrogant of you to think that we could. Not that I'm surprised, since you're the most arrogant person I know," she says to Dirk, and then she raises a threatening finger. "If you object by saying that I only know four people, I swear I will punch you." Dirk just stares at her, saying nothing.

"It's not about winning, though," says Jane.

"No, it's about fighting back. And Dirk, I know you put your bro on a ridiculously high pedestal: but the truth is, they were probably _terrified_ when it came to the end." Roxy sniffs. "But only idiots aren't scared when facing something as powerful as that harpy. And our ancestors knew what they were up against. We barely have any idea what we're doing." Although she takes a shaky breath, Roxy's eyes are firm. "But if we are going into certain death," she says, "we are going to make it as difficult as fucking possible for her to kill us. We are going to make her pay, for everything, as much as we can."

"I know all about the bravery of a heroic death," says Dirk nastily. "I've lived my life knowing who my bro was and what he did. You think I haven't tried being like him? It isn't fucking doable. He was a great swordsman and the ultimate master of irony. He painted Wilson and Stiller's faces onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel while I'm still trying to mould Play-Doh into dongs." He shakes his head. "I don't want to be a hero, because you don't walk away from that kind of shit. Have you ever heard of any heroes worth their salt who got to live to a happy old age? I want to fight my battles, but I want to be able to get up at the end! It is _not,_ " he snaps, "about fighting back – what the fuck is the point of dying to prove a point when there is nobody left to benefit from it? Our ancestors failed, they fell right on their fucking asses for a so-called higher purpose, and then? Their rebellion did absolutely nothing to make anything better! The only benefit I got from my bro's heroic death was a lifetime supply of orange soda!"

He doesn't notice that he's shouting until he stops and realises that he's stood up and that Roxy and Jane are looking at him, both speechless. Jane's mouth is pressed into a tight line with discomfort, and the sympathy on Roxy's face is almost overshadowed by how shocked she looks. He is tense all over: his fists are clenched at his sides, his breathing is shallow and rapid as if from running. 

"I can't see my best friends dead in my arms," he says, his voice catching on the last few words. "I thought I could handle it, but I can't. I'm a fucking disgrace of a leader. I can't distance myself enough from this. I care too much and it's not doing anyone any favours. What a great fuckin' Prince of Heart." 

He doesn't say everything that's on his mind. He doesn't say how he's afraid that he's been doing it wrong this entire time, and that they will get killed in vain purely on account of his mistakes, his overconfidence and his rash decisions. He doesn't say that he would much rather not care, that he wished there was a chip you cut out or a switch that you flicked that turned off your emotions or got rid of hope, because they are unnecessary hindrances, setbacks that keep him from being everything he tries to be. He doesn't admit how he is terrified of fucking up, and even more terrified of letting his friends see him fall apart. 

Roxy reaches out, her hand touching his. He goes unresponsive to the point of being nearly catatonic as she touches his other hand too. He can't focus; he wants to slice something in half and watch it ooze hydraulic fluid and spray sparks everywhere. She runs her hands up his arms and catches him just above the elbows. His eyes dart to Jane. She's watching worriedly, but keeping her distance. He can't stand how close they are; he wants to launch himself into the air and away from them both. Roxy takes a step closer, her hands moving to his shoulders. He could knock them out, he thinks, he could get the drone and take it to the Condesce, mow her down with the drone's arsenal and get Jake before they came to.

Except how he doesn't stand a chance against her alone. One god tier player is about as good as none. So he stays where he is, unyielding as Roxy's fingertips press into his shoulders to get his attention. He looks into her heart-shaped face and her worried eyes, and he sees that nothing escapes her: not the dumb, shrivelled form of his hope or the exact terms of his despair at their Sisyphean progress.

Roxy narrows her eyes at him and her hand twitches, going towards his face like she wants to take his shades off, but she thinks better of it and rests her hand against his cheek, stroking it. A corner of her mouth quirks into a smile that almost manages to be reassuring, and then she pulls Dirk into a hug, their chests squeezed together, her hands firm around his neck and shoulders.

A knot between Dirk's shoulder blades loosens, and he gingerly raises his arms, putting them around her. Roxy lets out a long breath, hooking her chin into the crook of his shoulder. Unsure what to do, Dirk awkwardly rubs circles on her upper back in what he hopes is a comforting way. She trills with laughter right next to his ear. It ends in a strained sob that she's trying to bite back as she hides her face in Dirk's neck.

There is a rush of air and then Jane is there; one of her arms goes around Dirk and the other around Roxy, who immediately extracts one arm from around Dirk's neck and pulls Jane into the hug, trapping Dirk's left arm between the three of them. He wiggles it out as Roxy is still trying not to sob, and places it around Jane's waist.

"You are such a pair of ninnies," says Jane, and Dirk can feel her smiling against his shoulder. "Of course it hurts to care, but it doesn't mean that you should stop." They straighten up from the hug, their arms still around each other. "We're our entire world now."

"If that witch wants us to get personal, we'll get personal. She tries to break us up, she suffers the consequences," says Roxy. "I don't even care about bullshit stats, it's not about that. It's about getting back at her."

"And we're going to hit her with all we've got," says Dirk resolutely. There is a knot of worry between Jane's eyebrows even as her lips twitch into a hesitant smile. Roxy's grin is devious and sharp like a knife.

  


* * *

  


Jake English wakes up, not from death but from a dream of red, green and void. He licks his dry lips and tastes blood. The scarred skin where his limb meets the peg leg feels like it has gone numb, pins and needles stabbing all the way up to his hip. His head is pounding with a persistent, deep throb at the back of his skull. 

He opens his eyes, and sees the nondescript ceiling. He closes his eyes, and remembers a corridor, and guards, and anger, anger like he'd never felt before making his limbs shake because this wasn't how he wanted it, this was against everything he believed would happen. 

He groans, turning his head until his cheek is pressed against the cold floor, and opens his eyes again. He sees greenish water, and thinks about his island and how vividly green the sea used to be on sunny days. He sees his hand lying limply by his side, covered in blood. He tries to move it, but all he manages is to twitch a couple of fingers before the pain makes him stop. Just before his eyes slip shut once more, he thinks he sees a green claw where his hand should be, fingers relaxing just like his are.

There's a soft splash of water and Jake opens his eyes to see her crouched over him, her expression inscrutable. 

"Well, well," she says softly. The tiara resting on her forehead glitters like her tyrian eyes, like the esca on top of the head of the anglerfish, and Jake is a minnow swimming towards her open jaws, smiling all the while. 

She reaches to touch his face, and the last thing Jake knows before he loses consciousness again is her cold fingers caressing his cheek.


	6. Sheol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?_ — Julius Caesar

Roxy lies with her head in Jane's lap and her legs draped across Dirk's thighs, contemplating mortality. Her own death isn't something she has ever been afraid of: everyone has to meet some sort of definite end, and she is pleased that her final scenes are playing out like this, with her best friends at her side and her head pleasantly buzzing with troll alcohol. It alleviates the pressure just behind her eyelids that makes her feel as if she would cry if she happened to be sober.

She has felt the bad part of dying before. Those first few seconds are just confusion, when you don't even realise what's going on, the feeling of your lungs collapsing and your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth, your vision going dark. Then the pain setting in, the kind that would make you scream if only you had any breath left in you. The _good_ part of death that sends a shiver of morbid excitement up her spine every time she thinks about it, is that you have nothing to lose. And then you take any chance you like.

"If we want to make this a definitive strike, we hit where it hurts the most," starts Dirk. "We know this so-called helmsman is the mainframe of the ship. So we kill the helmsman, we cause a total system failure, we disable the ship." He's staring at the ceiling as he talks, arms resting on the back of the seat. "It's basically a mercy killing. She's kept him as a husk for thousands of years and fuck knows what she's even done to his brain to keep him compliant. Or if there's even a lot of his brain left to speak of." He bounces one of his knees, upsetting Roxy's balance and making her grumble. "You're in charge of that, Roxy."

"There will be all kinds of failsafes and firewalls to stop me. If I was the Condesce, I wouldn't let something crucial to powering my entire ship go without some serious hardware and software protection and back-ups," she says.

"Are you saying you can't do it?"

"Hell no!" Roxy laughs, poking Dirk in the side with the toe of her boot. "I finally have a challenge worthy of my skills! I've been waiting ages for this."

"While Roxy does that," says Jane, "I'm taking care of Jake. I make sure he's in one piece, get him out of harm's way, and give him his guns back so he can join the fight as soon as possible."

Dirk nods. "And I draw the fire away from all of you," he says.

The closer they get to the end, the less sure Roxy is about Dirk's agenda. For someone who says he has no interest in being a hero, Dirk definitely displays the textbook traits of one. For someone who claims that caring is a hindrance, his emotional investment is what keeps pushing him forward. And yet, even though the doomsday clock is reaching midnight, he has been increasingly cagey about his feelings for Jake, something she's finding hard to understand. She's walked on him talking to Jane in worried, grave whispers, and she's caught his hand lingering on Jake's shoulder or on his hip, but that was as definite as it got. 

"Then we'll have Hope, Heart, Void and Life again," says Jane, counting the aspects on her fingers. "And we'll be able to defeat her, even if our session _is_ void. We won't make a new universe, but she'll still get her comeuppance." 

"We might still, if we join with the other session," argues Dirk.

"Do you think they're coming?"

Roxy watches Dirk and sees him pause. The thing about Dirk is, he doesn't give guarantees and he doesn't ask for them, because he knows how difficult it is to promise something in a world full of uncertainties. 

"I think we shouldn't use them as a crutch," he finally says. Jane nods.

What makes Roxy different from Dirk is that he doesn't run any unnecessary risks. He is reckless of danger and he has no sense of self-preservation, but at the same time he is calculating, headstrong and a stalwart supporter of the idea that business comes before pleasure. Sometimes she thinks that if you cut his head open, instead of a fleshy human brain you'd see a motherboard buzzing with activity and crackling with a staggering amount of FLOPS. For the majority of their lives, they've lived without the things that, as Roxy learned, most kids their age in the twenty-first century took for granted: love, hugs, a family, human contact. They've dealt with being alone and loneliness differently – while Roxy busied herself with various forms of esoteric sciences, Dirk built robots and made a copy of himself, because for the longest time he was the only person he could count on. She knows that each Dirk is as much of a Dirk as the next one, and she loves them equally, but she still doesn't have them completely figured out. Even when they started properly talking to each other, when she was sure he was beginning to trust her with more and more things, she always felt like there was a room inside of him that he kept locked, and that if she stared through the sealed, dirt-encrusted window, she could sometimes make out some shapes, but the door never opened. 

Roxy puts her arm behind her head, where her fingers meet Jane's. She's glad they ended the world because otherwise she wouldn't be able to hold Jane's hand, or see how drowsy and different she looks like when she takes her glasses off before going to sleep, or how warm and soft she feels when they hug.

She lightly jabs a finger into Dirk's hipbone. Lazily, he turns his head to look at her, eyeing her over the top of his glasses. Roxy sticks the tip of her tongue out at him, poking him again. He lets out a long-suffering sigh that Roxy knows is totally put on, and takes her hand in his. A corner of his mouth quirks upwards for such a brief moment that she almost misses it.

"I keep thinking about the blood we saw," says Jane. "And those claw marks! Did you see how deep they were? No carapace or troll has claws that are sharp enough to leave marks that deep in the metal. What do you think did it?"

"Maybe there are worse monsters on the ship, and we just haven't found them yet," says Dirk. 

"That's really reassuring!" laughs Roxy.

"It may be true, though," argues Jane. "As far as we've seen, this ship functions as a sort of an ark, doesn't it? You've got Carapacians, trolls and drones, so it makes sense that she would want to give them a new home planet. I mean," she shrugs, "that's what I would do."

"It makes sense that she'd try and take as much of her old home with her as she could fit on the ship," agrees Dirk. "Including possibly something like those monsters that Jake said roamed his island."

They fall silent again. Roxy watches Dirk rub his forehead with his free hand, and she realises she can't remember the last time she saw him asleep – unless you count death by imperial drone as sleep, which she is disinclined to do. Even though he's silent now, she can feel a pang of worry when she thinks back on him shouting. She's never heard Dirk so much as raise his voice before. He had always tried to distance himself and he'd have to practically be wrestled into a hug. When they'd first met, standing across from him was the closest Roxy had ever been to another person. She wanted to hug him, kiss him, and touch his face just to make sure that he was really there in front of her and not just a dream or a hallucination. But at the same time, she wanted to run back to be alone, to fold in on herself because even through the shades he was _looking_ at her, and she'd never felt more exposed. 

All of a sudden, she is able to understand Dirk better: it's like a light has switched on in the room she still can't get into, and she is able to see through the window. He doesn't act on his emotions, he suppresses them and doesn't let himself get involved because he is afraid, just as she was when they first met, afraid that it will overwhelm him and he won't know how to cope with it. He is disappointed in himself because he is unable to control his emotions entirely: he is disappointed in himself because he is _human_ , and it makes Roxy's heart clench because she wants to make him understand that his humanity could be his greatest strength in a place as alien as this.

"Prince of Heart," she says, absent-mindedly. Dirk has that faraway look in his eyes that he gets when he's talking to the auto-responder, and it takes him a few seconds longer than normal to react. He shifts to look at her, twisting his upper body. "Maid of Life." Jane ruffles her hair, smiling down at her. "Yeah," says Roxy, shooting her a smile in return and letting her eyes slip shut. This isn't how she imagined the start of the endgame to be like, but it's still the best she can hope for, holding onto the hands of her friends, listening to their breathing in the cushioned silence of the ship.

  


* * *

  


TT: Maybe you should have that drink.  
TT: Just because you never had your teenage years filled with overconsumption of alcohol and saturated with regret doesn't mean that you are entitled to live vicariously through me.  
TT: So unfair. What's the point of you, then?  
TT: I can't imagine the Batterwitch will offer you a refreshing soda and a sit-down. Since you've been ignoring my persistent warnings more thoroughly than Edward Norton ignored Yoda's advice in The Incredible Hulk, it could be the last drink you'll ever have. So why not?  
TT: How do you differentiate what will never happen from what never even existed?  
TT: Can we postpone discussing your sex life?  
TT: Ha. Ha ha.  
TT: How do I know that we were ever winning, since the odds of anything going well from this point on are so astronomically low?  
TT: How do you know that winning is expected of you?

  


* * *

  


Jane soon finds out that riding an imperial drone is impossible without heavily concentrating on your kidneys and stomach and holding on to hope that they won't be pummelled out of your body. There must be still some programming resisting the auto-responder's remote control, because the drone she and Roxy are perched on as they advance through the ship's corridors seems to be all uncoordinated joints, most of them knees. She considers dismounting and continuing on foot, but the erratic rocking and shaking of the drone is the only thing that is certain to keep her awake and on her toes. She wishes she could rest, just for a quick nap, and then rebukes herself for being selfish almost immediately. The drone's shoulder twitches under her, as if it's trying to shake off a fly, and Jane gives a surprised yelp, grabbing a tighter hold of the drone's horn. 

"You alright?" asks Roxy, perched on the drone's other shoulder. She's hooked her elbow around a curve in the horn, and she seems to have found a position that doesn't make her shake and shift with every other step the drone makes. 

"Just a tad unsteady!" Jane says, offering her a reassuring grin. 

"No, I mean, with all this," explains Roxy, waving her free hand to encompass the corridor they're walking down, the drone and Dirk ahead of it, and the portholes looking out into space. "What if you could change who you are, if you could just click your heels and make none of this to have happened, would you start again?"

"Would you?"

Roxy gives a one shouldered shrug, quirking a corner of her mouth upward. "Dirk says that our existences were tailored to us playing the game, and I hate that. I don't like that some external power gets to run my life and I have absolutely no say in it, and that whatever I do, even if I try to sabotage it, it'll inevitably lead me to where it wants me to go." 

"Well, my life was defined by the fact that I was the heiress to Crockercorp. And it was exhilarating!" says Jane, trying to keep the enthusiasm in her voice. "But I wonder who I'd be without that."

"You'd still be a super sleuth, a top prankster and a great gal!" says Roxy, flashing her a grin. Jane offers an indulgent smile in return.

"I don't know if I could start again," she says. "I miss my dad, I miss the familiarity of waking up in my bed every morning and knowing more or less how the day is going to go, I miss danged _lemon meringue,_ of all things! I miss watching _Poirot_ and pretending my room is 33a Peckender Street, but…" She trails off, tugging on her lower lip with her teeth, thinking. "If having all that back would mean I'd have to give you up, and Jake and Dirk… I couldn't! I just couldn't! I wouldn't be able to do it." She still doesn't take anything they encounter at face value, because questioning everything is almost a necessity for survival at this point, but she has learned to trust her friends more, Roxy especially. As good a friend as Dirk is, he gets self-absorbed and cagey – Roxy is always prepared to be there for her and be honest with her.

"I'd rather know you in these circumstances than not know you at all, Janey," says Roxy, smiling softly.

"So, forward is the only way we can go anymore," agrees Jane. 

Roxy regards her for a moment, and then nods. "It's kind of scary to know that she could be waiting for us around any corner," she says worriedly.

"Oh, I don't think she will be. She'll wait in her throne room until we come to her willingly, because she knows that's where we _have_ to end up." Jane pauses to hold on as the drone shakes to a halt. Dirk slaps the wrist of Jack's severed arm to a panel next to a closed door in front of them. After a few moments, the door jolts reluctantly open, revealing a corridor almost identical to the one they're in now. "That's why, I think," says Jane as the drone starts moving again, going into the next, equally deserted corridor, "she's not been sending anyone after us. She evidently wants us to get there more or less unscathed." She's had so many assassination attempts on her life that it started to become too stressful to count them after a while. For most of her life, she had frustratingly been kept in an ivory tower, and they still managed to get to her. She has never really had to go _looking_ for mortal peril before, and yet here she is now, willingly walking into it, for the sake of her friends.

"You seem oddly calm about this!" comments Roxy.

Jane laughs nervously, looking over Roxy's shoulder and through the porthole behind her. Stars twinkle in the distance, and do nothing to loosen the anxious knot in the pit of her stomach. She wishes she had the words with which she could let Roxy know how calm she wasn't being.

"The more I think about this, it's so much like Crockercorp was. You keep going, because you want to know what's at the end. It gets under your skin so gosh darned fast, and it does it without even trying. And then before you know it, your room is all red and white and you're holding your breath for their next gizmo!" She huffs violently, the gust of air dishevelling her fringe. "I just…" She trails off. "I just had so much pride in the entire Crockercorp empire, I was so excited to inherit it all, I had such great plans! And then it all turned out to be nothing." 

Roxy's face falls. "Jane, I—"

The drone lurches forward, halting to a stop and Jane slips on its plating, managing to steady herself before she slides off. Roxy shouts, legs kicking frantically and her arms cartwheeling cartoonishly in the air, and then she slips down the drone's shoulder and lands on the floor with a thud that makes Jane wince with sympathy pain.

"Dirk motherfucking Strider, I am going to take my gun and I am going to shoot you right through the hull of this ship!" yells Roxy, sitting splay-legged on the floor. "I'm going to shoot you into space and watch you fly all the way to the Furthest Ring and get devoured by the Noble Circle!" Dirk is looking at her, a mixture of long-suffering patience and mild amusement on his face. Standing, Jane notices, in front of a closed, convex door. "Do you want to know what's worse than Dirk Strider getting eaten by a horrorterror? Dirk Strider getting eaten by a dozen horrorterrors!" barks Roxy. She pushes herself off the floor and stands up, brushing down her skirt. "Why did glasses stop the drone?"

"Hang on," says Dirk, falling silent for a moment while he consults the auto-responder. His mouth twists with displeasure. "That's weird, he says he didn't."

"Wh—"

Drunkenly, the drone right itself to its full height, straightening out its knees. It raises its head, turning it to face Jane. Her stomach drops. Instead of Roxy's signature pink, the drone's eyes are back to their regular, terrifyingly bright white. Its arm goes up, reaching towards Roxy. She stumbles out of the way, the drone's hand narrowly missing her, its claws scraping on the floor where she was standing only second ago.

Dirk's hand is on the hilt of his katana and Roxy is decaptchaloguing her rifle, but Jane is a step ahead of them both, her trident out. "Get the door open!" she orders. "I'll distract it!" 

She sees Dirk give her the thumbs up, and then all her attention is on the drone. It lunges forward to get at Dirk and Roxy, making Jane slip backwards from its shoulder. She catches herself halfway to the ground, arching upwards until she's level with the back of the drone's neck. A part of the drone's shoulder plates lifts, exposing three sets of missile barrels on each shoulder. It angles them towards Dirk and Roxy. Jane can hear the missiles slotting into place as Dirk raises his katana. Behind him, Roxy pushes Jack's barcode wrist to the console, which flashes an angry red. She swears loudly and starts frantically jabbing at the buttons, trying to get the door open.

Jane takes a deep intake of breath and, squaring her shoulders, wedges her red trident between the gaps in the red plating of the drone's back. 

Her arms shake with effort as she pushes the weapon sideways to do as much damage as she can and then pulls it out, snapping a few wires on the way. Hydraulic fluid leaks down to the floor as the drone turns, rounding on her. She imagines she can hear the clicking of the mechanism, and then the drone fires from its left shoulder. 

She leans backwards as far as she can, clutching her trident and crossing her hands over her chest as she throws herself to the floor. The missiles whizz above her, a red blur so close to her head that she can smell burning hair as they pass. Jane crashes to the ground, pain searing across her shoulder blades and back. She risks a look behind and sees the missiles trail down the corridor and hit a wall in the distance, far enough that the only thing she feels is the hot wind of the blast. When she stands up, the drone has raised the plates on its forearms, aiming the machine guns at her. She doesn't doubt that it'll fire the missiles again, too: this is an attack she won't be able to dodge.

"Jane!" she hears Dirk shout. "Get over here!" Behind the drone, she sees that Roxy has managed to get the door open, and both her and Dirk are standing just beyond the doorframe, waving her over. Jane holds her breath, closes her eyes and flies between the drone's legs just as it fires. Bullets rain and missiles zoom behind her as she bursts through the door, landing into Roxy's arms. She gets to her senses quick enough to see the drone turn, a fresh batch of missiles slotting into place.

"Close it!" Jane screams, and Dirk slams both hands on the input panel, hitting all the buttons at once. The drone fires, and Jane closes her eyes to the sight of six approaching missiles, Roxy clutching her upper arms to keep her on her feet, her panicked breathing loud in Jane's ear.

The doors shut, and Jane feels the floor shake with the force of impact as the missiles collide with the metal. Roxy gasps, squeezing Jane's arms harder. The shaking grows feebler and then stops entirely, and Jane opens her eyes. She's met with Roxy and Dirk's confused faces, bathed in a peculiar pale green light. 

"Those were some _sweet_ evasive manoeuvres, Jane!" says Roxy. 

"Thanks! I'm still a bit rattled." Jane laughs, nervously but proudly: gone is the helpless heiress who needs to be mollycoddled. "Are we pressing on?"

"Yeah," says Dirk, and Jane notices that he's looking at a spot directly behind her. There's something strange reflected in his glasses, something her mind is unable to process at first. She turns around.

They're in a small, cylindrical glass elevator travelling up, up through a huge expanse of dark water, sparsely lit and appearing kelp green where brighter. Dirk once told her of the days when he would sit on his window ledge and fish, and how there would be big, dark bodies under the water, confusingly and unnervingly close to the surface; and how sometimes, when he perched on the iron girders which rose from the bottom of the ocean, the tips of his toes brushing the surface, something would brush back. 

Jane sees her own face reflected in the glass, almost ghostly white in the murk. She can't tell if it's smudges on the glass, or if she can see _things,_ shapes moving in the water. 

"This must be the pool for all the monsters she planned to put in the oceans after she landed the ship," says Roxy from behind her as the elevator continues to soundlessly rise. In her reflection in the glass, Jane can see that Roxy's eyes are wide and darting about, as if she's trying to spot if the pool is empty. She can't see the bottom.

"Before we went in, there was a sign next to the data pad," says Dirk. "Did you translate it?"

Roxy glances at him. "Yeah," she says. " _To helmsblock._ " Jane feels her breath catch in her throat. 

Dirk rolls his shoulders, readying his sword. "Right. As soon as we surface, be ready to fight."

Jane stretches first one leg, than the other, shaking the tension out of her muscles. When she first started using the trident, she barely knew what to do with it. She didn't have the proper training or enough strength to wield it properly: the weak muscles of her upper arms and shoulders burned and there were times when she could barely lift the weapon. Dirk and Jake had grown up using their weapons, and Roxy handled her rifle with practiced ease. Jane had tried firing Roxy's rifle once: the kickback was so powerful that her shoulder hurt for hours after. 

She had lived in the suburbs all her life, and the most lethal thing she'd taken up before they started playing the game was a steak knife. She'd felt embarrassed, inept and clumsy among the three of them, who all made it look like using their strife specibi was absurdly easy. That was when she had realised that Dirk's eagerness to push to the limit and make a person the best they could be didn't end at Jake. Although he had never used a pole-arm himself, he was the only one of them not using a firearm, so he offered to strife with Jane for practice. She had got the basic principle of the thing within the first few minutes, but it took hours for her to learn the fine points. Her footwork was terrible, she wasn't fast enough and Dirk kept disrupting her balance and knocking her weapon out of her hands. 

It was going terribly until Roxy had shouldered Dirk away and taught Jane how to turn her weaknesses into strengths: how to keep her balance, how to move quickly and sidestep a blow. Dirk beat his opponent back, for which Jane didn't have enough strength. Instead, Roxy showed her how to use the opponent's own speed and power to change the direction of their weapon. She taught her the lightest touch style – how to only hit with the top six inches of her weapon, and to use her wrists and forearms in her hits rather than her biceps. Jane was able to use her short stature to her advantage rather than allow it to hold her back. During her next strife with Dirk, Jane had locked his blade between the tines of the trident and flung his sword ten feet away. Dirk's impressed, baffled grin meant that she no longer felt like the weakest of the group.

"I guess this is really it, then," comments Roxy while checking the power cells in her rifle. 

"Seems like it," agrees Dirk, flexing his wrist, the blade whistling softly as it slices through the air. Still looking into the water, Jane spots a flicker of movement. She moves closer to the glass as Dirk says, "Jane?" She narrows her eyes, her nose almost touching the cold glass. As the elevator climbs, the water becomes lighter, turning from deep blue to teal green. Jane stares at the water for a split second longer, and then turns to face Dirk and Roxy.

"Sorry, I thought—never mind," she shakes her head. She taps her trident on the floor, anxiously twiddling it between her fingers. She remembers how they used to think they'd somehow beat the rules, conquer the odds and win. How self-assured Dirk was about victory. Squeezing the handle of the trident, she recalls the way the tips of her fingers and her ears would feel like static electricity was bouncing off them every time she levelled up. How Roxy did a double backward-somersault in the air when she reached the top of her echeladder, and the peals of laughter when she started a tickling contest that Jane ended up winning. When she looks at them now, they are both ashen-faced and exhausted. Although they know the odds are far from being in their favour, they still carry on because they're doing this for revenge, for their ancestors, and most importantly, for Jake. 

"It's been one hell of a ride," says Dirk.

"And it will be one hell of a boss fight!" exclaims Roxy, grinning widely. 

"I'm glad I'm fighting it alongside you," says Jane. Instead of an answer, Roxy gives her a warm smile. A corner of Dirk's mouth twists fondly upwards. 

The elevator breaks the surface, softly coming to a halt. Water drips down the glass, and the doors slide open.

They ready their weapons, and step out into the helmsblock.

  


* * *

  


The first thing Dirk notices about the helmsblock is how deserted it seems. The silence is almost oppressive in the way it clamps down on his ears and makes even his breathing and his heartbeat sound tumultuous. The air is stagnant, the smell of salt and sea water permeating everything. He glances quickly at the surface of the lusus tank, but the water is undisturbed, unmoving. He expected the Condesce, he expected drones and explosions – this is much worse.

His fingers are clammy on the handle of his sword as they walk forward. The room is lit in the middle and dark on the edges, and Dirk notices Roxy being very mindful of the corners. There's a fenestrated plane in the corner, its four screens flickering with muted colours in the half light. The first screen shows a decapitated drone in front of a cell containing Jack Noir, who is writhing on the floor and clutching the stump of his arm. The second is the high court, showing a gigantic troll lying in a pool of indigo blood. Dirk's own face looks back at him from the third screen, white as a sheet. The fourth part of the fenestrated plane shows space – in the centre of the screen, there's a small, grey planet scarred with craters left by meteors. It seems entirely unremarkable, apart from the clump of towering structures on its north pole. 

It seems that the helmsblock doubles as an observation deck: a floor to ceiling, wall to wall window stands across the room from them. A structural weakness for the ship, and an advantage to them, Dirk thinks. Roxy could easily blast it off, if needed. The twinkling of the stars and the spectacular view of this spectacularly dull piece of universe is partially blocked from view by a tall, wide pillar. Its design is uneven, and as they come closer, Dirk can see why. Thousands of black and tyrian wires coil and spiral from the ceiling around the pillar and to the floor, some of them as thin as a hair, some of them thicker than Dirk's arm. A cluster of them snakes across the floor and dips into the tank, and when Dirk takes a closer look, he realises they are pulsating in an even rhythm. He touches his hand to the wires on the back of the pillar, and feels condensation, like sweat, and under his palm slowly, unmistakably, a heartbeat. 

Taking his hand away and wiping it on his trousers, he sees Jane carefully step over the vein-like wires which curl down from the pillar and towards the window. She stands directly in front of the pillar and Dirk watches her eyes widen before she staggers backwards, utter shock painted on her face. She holds onto her trident for support and leans forward, retching. Nothing comes out, just gags and coughs and a thin trail of spit down her lower lip. Roxy runs to her side, rubbing her back. She looks to the pillar, and her hand on Jane's back stops moving.

"Dirk," she breathes. 

Jane straightens up, gasping for breath as she wipes her mouth with the back of her sleeve. "I'm sorry," she says hoarsely, "but when you said the helmsman, I didn't think you meant—" Sword raised, Dirk faces the front of the pillar. "—that."

Dirk never cared to explore the intricacies of alien biomechanics, and when he sees what's before him, he completely understands Jane's reaction. _He isn't an AI, he is the ship,_ the auto-responder had said. Dirk feels his stomach muscles clench with nausea as he realises what the AR meant. 

The Helmsman's torso is embedded into the pillar. 

That's what he is now and what he's probably been for thousands of years, nothing more than a torso – his body ends where his hips should begin, and instead there is what Dirk is now sure are veins, stabbing into his flesh and keeping him alive and imprisoned, pumping and filtering blood and terabytes of data in and out. His uniform is a glossy yellow with two black stripes running down his chest. Underneath it, his body is wiry and underdeveloped, and Dirk lifts his gaze to look into a face that's sallow, cheekbones jutting out of sunken cheeks, fangs dulled with lack of use pressing into a cracked lower lip. 

The eyes are half-lidded, one entirely blue and the other red, glassy and dull behind a pair of tyrian goggles. In the corners, Dirk can see streaks of mustard coloured tears, blood, or both, running down the sides of his face. His arms are raised above his head and black veins twist thickly around them, binding him to the pillar, to the ship's computer systems. Two pairs of horns protrude from a shock of unruly hair, but Dirk can't stop looking at the eyes, and at the way his body is leaning forwards towards the window. He faces space and it's all he sees, vast and unreachable, promising freedom and reminding him of his captivity. If he checked, Dirk knows he'd probably find black veins puncturing key points in the Helmsman's spine, keeping him in place. 

"How could anyone do this to a person?" says Jane.

"I don't think he's a person anymore," says Roxy.

"Cutting his throat or stabbing him through the heart won't work, then," says Dirk, trying to sound matter-of-fact, fighting the mounting disgust he feels for the Condesce, for this wretch. "It probably has backups against that." It makes his skin prickle with anger to think that this is how all troll starships are powered, by embedding minds and bodies of living things into the synthetic circuitry of the ship. He runs his hands across the veins close to the Helmsman's torso and, sure enough, his fingers trace the edge of an input panel hidden behind a cluster of wires. He decaptchalogues Jack's knife and uses it to shimmy the panel out from between the wires, taking care not to accidentally cut any of them. He hands it to Roxy. "You know what to do," he says. "Do it quickly."

Roxy takes the panel from him, stepping closer to the pillar. Just as Dirk did, she puts a hand on the pulsating veins but lets go immediately, as if burned. "He's alive!" she says, aghast. She brings a hand to the Helmsman's mouth, and nearly drops the panel. "He's still breathing! That throbbing in the wires is his _heartbeat_ , Dirk!"

"And? You said it yourself; he isn't a person any more. It's exactly like pulling the plug on a machine," says Dirk. "Did any of those trolls hesitate when they tried to kill you?" He raises his eyebrows at her stunned expression. "Tick tock. Get on with it."

"He's clearly not a part of this out of his own free will!" Jane objects. "No one chooses that kind of life. How can you be like this, Dirk?"

"Like what? How can I care more about what happens to us than to this vegetable? I don't know, Jane, you tell me."

"Dirk?" a voice calls out from the darkness. All three of them turn towards the sound, weapons ready, Dirk's heart in his throat. "Jane? Roxy?"

"Jake?" Jane says in a soft voice even as Roxy shouts it, looking wildly around to try and spot him. Dirk can feel his blood rush through him faster because he's _alive,_ Jake's alive, they've found him. And then he remembers what Jane said. _He's the bait._

"English?" he calls out carefully, placing a hand on Roxy's arm to stop her from seeking him out. She looks at him questioningly, and he shakes his head. "Are you alright, bro? Come out where we can see you." 

_Clunk, clunk, clunk._ He comes out of the shadows to their right, still in his cream coloured Page pyjamas, looking slightly green in the face, either from the reflection of the water or from fatigue. He pauses, seeming hesitant as he leans on his good leg, the peg leg catching the light like gold coins in a treasure chest. With a rush of affection, Dirk notices Lil' Cal riding piggy-back on Jake's shoulders, the puppet's face looking as content as if it was sewn to be there.

"Jake, hey! We were worried about you," says Jane, smiling encouragingly. Jake looks from her, to Roxy and then to Dirk, appearing to calculate his next step. This strikes Dirk as peculiar, especially the way Jake's eyes dart towards the dark corners of the room and then, briefly, to the pool. 

Dirk doesn't have the luxury of dwelling on this further, because Roxy and Jane lower their weapons and they're already hugging Jake. Roxy tries to pick them both up, and then they're all in the air, turning like a drunken spinning top and flying towards Dirk. Sheathing his sword and dropping his guard entirely, he laughs loudly, kicking off the ground and joining them, his arms meeting Roxy's around Jake and Jane's waist. 

"Kissing chain!" announces Roxy and turns to her right, smacking one on Jane's cheek. Jane hoots with laughter and turns to Dirk, pecking his cheek. Dirk turns to Jake and hesitates, because Jake is looking at him with that entirely goofy, entirely disarming grin on his face that he's seen a thousand times, and Dirk can see Jake's cheeks starting to colour, and he's praying that he isn't in the same situation.

"Come on, Dirk!" Roxy urges. "Don't break the chain – you'll get seven years of bad luck!"

"That's mirrors," Dirk can't help but argue, even as he leans closer and presses his lips against Jake's cheek. Like everything else in this place, he smells like seawater and salt, but also like Jake as he laughs breathlessly and turns away, sloppily kissing Roxy's cheek. 

Their feet touch ground with seven soft steps and a _clunk_ , and Roxy ruffles Jake and Jane's hair with a grin before breaking the hug and taking her rifle, back to being serious. Jane decaptchalogues Jake's pistols and hands them to him, and he spins them on his thumbs like the most clichéd Western movie star. 

"We need to get a move on," says Dirk. "Roxy, the Helmsman. There are four of us now, we can easily—" He stops, interrupted by the unmistakeable sloshing of water against the side of the lusus tank. 

"What's the rush, Prince of Heart?" 

Her voice is like an oil slick in the ocean. She steps out of the pool, water sliding off her skin-tight suit, jewellery glittering like the sun skittering off the surface of the sea. She is taller than any of the trolls they've fought on the ship, except perhaps the head subjugglator: her horns are half her height, curving gradually outward towards the tips. Huge and presumably very heavy, Dirk wonders how she can keep her head up, and yet her chin is tilted haughtily upwards. Fin-like growths poke through her hair, which spills down her shoulders, past her hips, down to the floor like it's an entirely independent creature. She holds her trident like it's a sceptre. 

"You just got here."

Jane readies her trident and Dirk unsheathes his sword as Jake releases the safety on his guns and Roxy aims her rifle, the weapon making a high pitched noise as it quickly charges up. The Condesce raises her hand, the tips of her fingers aflame with red and blue sparks. They outstretch like a cat o' nine tails, grabbing Jane around the waist and Roxy around the throat, throwing them in opposite directions. Roxy manages to fire her rifle even as she's jerked away. The blast hits the floor, leaving a shallow, smoking crater behind and missing the Condesce entirely before another pair of tendrils tears Roxy's rifle out of her hands. Dirk feels the electrical tendrils wrap around his wrists like shackles, singing the hairs on his arms and making him drop his sword. He barely registers his own surprise and he's already being flung through the air. His back hits the window with such force there's an irrational part of him which is sure that it must have cracked. He slides down the glass and to the floor, all the bones of his upper body blazing with pain. 

Dirk tries to get up, but he feels something heavy crawl over his legs. He looks down, and sees a number of the veins from the Helmsman's pillar making their slow, steady way towards him across the floor. He remembers Jack's knife which Roxy was handling only moments ago: it's lying on the floor next to the Helmsman's pillar, and if he's quick enough he could be able to reach it. Before he can move, two veins as thick as his calf rise from the floor like a pair of cobras and strike, pinning his arms to the floor. They burn like jellyfish where they touch his skin. He tries to wriggle free, to kick them away, but it's as useless as trying to blow down a brick house. Looking up at the Helmsman, he sees that his eyes are fully open and glowing a brighter red and blue, almost like staring directly at a high watt bulb. If Dirk closed his eyes now, he'd see their imprint on the backs of his eyelids. 

All the lights in the helmsblock switch on and Dirk sees Roxy on the floor, pinned down by the red and blue electrical lines. She can't move much, but when she does try to, they lash her across the face, and she falls back down immediately. Her rifle is far out of reach, lying on at the very edge of the lusus pool. 

He looks for Jane on the other side of the room. Miraculously, she's on her feet, although her knees are shaking with the effort of keeping her upright, her limbs crawling with red and blue static. She's holding her trident, pointing it at the Condesce, who – Dirk realises with a sickening lurch of his stomach – is holding Jake by the hair, his head pulled back and the tines of her trident pressed against his throat. Lil' Cal and both his pistols are on the ground, the barrel of one of them sliced clean in half. 

"Let him go, witch!" Jane demands. 

"What an heiress you are," the Condesce drawls. "Your backbone is almost impressive, for a human. I'm disappointed you foiled my mind control. You would have made a fun plaything."

"If you touch him I'll kill you!"

"Look at you!" says the Condesce. "I've overpowered all of your friends with a wave of my hand, you're barely standing and you're still trying to _threaten me_? Your bravery and strength is commendable, Maid. What do you think you will accomplish by strutting about like this? Do you think he'll love you if you save him?" She spits out the word _love_ like it leaves a nasty taste in her mouth. 

Jane stumbles forward, faltering under the power of the Condesce's psionics. Even from this distance, Dirk can smell her burnt clothing as the static crackles over her arms, attempting to pin her down. "He already does!" Jane counters, trident still pointed at the Condesce, her hands shaking with the effort. "Your mind games won't work, you don't know anything about human emotion!"

Jake struggles against the Condesce, and she pulls on his hair more violently, keeping him in check. His chest heaving like a terrified animal's, he swallows as if trying to move his throat as little as possible as the sharp tips of the tines push into his skin.

"I've watched you for longer than you know, Jane Crocker," says the Condesce. "What humans call friendship sickens me. Royalty gets what it wants: I see what I desire, and I make it mine by any means necessary. You humans twist and writhe and play at platonic affection to try and worm your way into someone's heart. My efforts gave me immortal reign and brought you gods to your knees. What have you got to show for how underhanded you've been, how you've hidden your intentions behind a guise of friendship?"

"I've done nothing of the sort!" protests Jane. "Jake and I are friends, he knows that! There's no hidden ploy!"

"And what good is she to you?" says the Condesce, this time addressing Jake. "What good are any of them? It's like I told you, all they do is use you for their own amusement. They befriended you not because they like you, but because they like it better than being alone." 

Movement at the corner of his vision makes Dirk look in Roxy's direction. She is still pinned down, but the grip of the red and blue sparks seems to have lessened, most of the Condesce's concentration being on Jane and Jake. Eyes watering with the effort of movement, she is attempting to soundlessly crawl across the floor towards her rifle. She catches Dirk's eye and puts a finger to her lips. He quickly looks away, not wanting to draw attention to her. 

Jake stares at Jane, who shakes her head vehemently. "It's true, though," he says slowly. A smile spreads the Condesce's lips and she moves her trident just for a hair's breadth away from Jake's throat.

"I mean, Jane," Jake continues, swallowing thickly when the pressure on his throat lessens, "you were grounded half the time because of the attempts on your life. And you said all the kids in your neighbourhood thought you were too kooky because you were so into detectives, and that nobody would spend time with you." He pauses, as if he has to try out what these thoughts feel like in his head before he is able to articulate them. "And Strider," he continues, "he told me himself that he and Roxy were the only living kids on the planet." He frowns speculatively. "They probably got tired of each other's company pretty quickly. He can be so fiercely arrogant and Roxy is so often drunk to her gills!"

Dirk is silently proud of Jake for bluffing and going along with the Condesce's ridiculous claims. He knows what she is trying to do, since he'd probably be trying to do the same in her position. She's attempting to drive them apart, because they would be much easier to beat if there was friction between them. Despite how affronted Jake looks and how convinced he sounds by what he's saying, Dirk is sure that Jake _must_ be putting this on, because the thought of anything else being true is too ludicrous for him to consider. 

"What are you saying?" Jane cries, apparently not as convinced as Dirk. "We love you because of who you are, not because you happened to be there at the time! This isn't you!"

The Condesce leans to whisper something into Jake's ear. Dirk can't catch what she says, but the familiarity with which she does it makes his skin crawl.

Jake's eyes dart frantically about the room and then land back on Jane. "Who am I then, Jane?" he demands. "None of you has ever paid any attention to who I am, you just dreamed up a version of me that most suited your needs! Jake the Page, Jake the quaint man of the past, Jake the dweeb, Jake who is just so flipping eager to be fitted into whatever dumfungled mould you can squeeze him in!" 

Jake is getting angry in earnest, his cheeks flushed and his eyes wide as he shouts at Jane, who seems confused and hurt by his words. She is using her trident to hold herself up at this point, her knees shaking as she tries to remain standing. She looks on the verge of crying, and Dirk struggles to understand why Jake would go to such lengths to convince the Condesce that he was buying her horseshit, that he would actually say things that are deliberately meant to hurt. And the whole thing about all of them constructing different Jakes to suit their tastes is completely asinine as well. He has no idea where that's coming from, since he knows what the real Jake is like – he's a complete goober whose physical prowess and fantastic gunslinging quite often gets lost in how much a gullible, adorable nerd he is.

"No!" Jane argues. "You know that's not true! We just tried to help you fulfil your potential, that's what friends are for! Please listen to yourself, you're talking nonsense!"

"Stop telling me what to do!" yells Jake.

The Condesce laughs to herself. "You have _no_ idea what you've got in front of you. Do you, Jane Crocker?" she says, and Dirk watches her withdraw her trident from Jake's throat, her hand from his hair. She grabs his throat, her claws digging into his skin, and Dirk thinks that this is it; she's going to break his neck. 

Several things happen at once. Roxy reaches her rifle and fires it from a kneeling position. The beam of white energy illuminates the helmsblock like the midday sun as it tears towards the Condesce. She whirls around, letting go of Jake who staggers forward and falls to his knees. Her psionic grip on Jane disappears, and Jane's legs give out, making her collapse to the ground. Jets of red and blue fire course out of the Condesce's fingertips and towards the white energy. There is a loud shriek of opposing forces as the two collide in mid air, and Dirk squeezes his eyes shut, struggling in vain against his bonds and wishing the terrible sound would go away.

When he opens his eyes again, the light is gone. His eyes still sting from the aftermath of the flash, and it takes a couple of seconds for his vision to adjust. There's the Condesce, her suit coming off her shoulder in tatters, revealing a fresh wound, the dark purple, torn flesh still smoking from where the rifle blast hit her. Relieved, Dirk sees that it's her dominant hand: she's dropped the weapon to the ground, her arm hanging limply by her side. 

"Dirk!" shouts Roxy urgently, and he knows what to do. Trying to ignore the way the tendrils of the ship's biomechanics are digging into his arms and legs, Dirk focuses all his concentration on the Condesce, and does the Heart thing.

It's more difficult to keep a grip on it than it ever was up to this point, and if he squints his eyes just so, Dirk can almost see the health bar with the Condesce's hit points flickering on and off. Her head slumps forward and her knees wobble, and Dirk is so focused on making her stay weak and not reach for her trident or try to use her powers on them that he doesn't notice Roxy standing above him with Jack's knife until she slashes at the veins binding him. He feels tyrian fluid spurt out and soak his pyjamas. 

"Keep at it," instructs Roxy, slicing him free. He notices how pale she is, and how the long cut across her cheek is still bleeding. There are red burn marks around her throat from where the Condesce's psionics first grabbed her.

"She's fighting it!" Dirk says, and he can feel sweat roll down his face from the effort of keeping a grip on the Condesce. Pain sears in his chest, as if his ribs are clamping down on his lungs. The Condesce yowls with frustration, her fingers on her trident, unable to close her hand into a fist and pick it up. 

"Just a bit longer!" Roxy assures him, and stomps down a tendril which tries to snake back up Dirk's foot. It bursts under her shoe like a fresh watermelon, spraying her with sticky fluid. She calls out Jane's name, and then Jane is beside her, Jake woodenly trailing behind.

"Okay, Dirk," says Roxy, turning to him, "when I tell you to drop it, you do it, and not any earlier, yeah?" Dirk nods, and a bead of sweat falls from the tip of his nose. Roxy hands Jack's knife to Jane. "Jane, when I count to three, I want you to throw that knife as hard as you can at her heart, and Dirk, I want you to stop doing the Heart thing," she says.

"I don't trust this plan," objects Jane, cautiously regarding the dagger in her hand. 

Roxy sighs with evident exasperation. "Trust _me_. For once, just trust me. We don't have much time!" Reluctantly, Jane nods. "Okay, one!" Roxy shouts. "Two!" Jane raises the knife. 

"Three!"

Dirk stops the Heart thing, exhaustion making him slump down, his pyjama top sticky with his sweat and the goop from the wires. Jane throws the knife with all the strength she can gather. For an incredible fraction of a second, Dirk thinks Roxy's plan is going to work, and then the Condesce recovers from his attack. She snaps up with frightening speed and agility, holding her trident in her uninjured hand, and as she raises her arm, _the knife changes direction_ just like that, shooting towards Jane. Roxy flexes her fingers and twists her wrists until her bones crack. She rolls her shoulders and brings her arms up, and raises the Void.

Wisps of dark lick up the air like a snake pit of shadows, and as the knife hits them, the Void deflects it, sending it slamming into the fenestrated plane. Dirk notices that the image of the grey planet – meteor, he is pretty sure now that it's some sort of meteor – has got bigger, and then that part of the screen cracks and flickers off when the knife drives into it, broken glass raining down onto the floor. 

The third screen, which had Dirk's face looking back at him, goes entirely black as the Void blankets them. It wavers like a gust of smoke in the wind, shimmering with coils of dark emptiness between the four of them and the Condesce. They're not invisible, not exactly: but as long as the barrier is up, her eyes will simply slide over them, and if she hears them talking, she will think it's just the crackle of static or the sound of her heartbeat.

"We're not out of ammo yet!" shouts Roxy, laughing with relief and what sounds to Dirk like a small side order of hysterics. She reaches out a hand to him and he takes it, pulling himself up from the floor and standing up on legs still aching from when the veins held him down.

"Good thinking," he says, and Roxy gives him a proud smile. "But now we need a plan B. Clearly attacking her head on won't work as well as I thought. I'm accepting any suggestions you may want to put forward." 

Roxy takes her sleeve to her cheek and wipes off the blood, wincing as the fabric touches her wound. "This has bought us some time to regroup. I think we should try and get some of our strength back before we charge again."

"Being bound by that psychic energy wasn't really my idea of a jolly time!" Jane agrees, rubbing her arms with the attempt to get feeling back into them. Jake stands a little further away from her, hunched forward and frowning. 

"Well done on the expert bluffing there, English," Dirk congratulates him. "You could have even fooled me."

Jake looks up, confused. "Bluffing?"

"Where are you little monsters?" The shout from the Condesce makes them all look past the Void barrier. It distorts sound in the strangest way, like hearing her voice from behind a sheet of whispering rain. She paces the helmsblock, looking wildly around for something she can't possibly perceive. "You can't hide forever," she warns. "You know what this is like, Rogue? You're making the same mistakes your ancestors did. You think you can hide from me, you have the gall to think you can _defeat_ me? I hold the power of my entire race. All you're doing is postponing your inevitable demise."

"Don't listen to her!" warns Roxy, but Dirk isn't even paying attention to the Condesce's words. He's studying Jake's expression, his brain working furiously. 

"It makes me laugh to think you don't even realise the futility of your quest," says the Condesce. "There is no victory for you; there are no spoils to reap. He's here, you dumb wigglers, and you helped let him in!"

Jake massages his temples, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. Dirk notices that his hair is matted to his forehead with sweat. Lil' Cal clings to his shoulders once again, grinning. "Jake, are you okay?" asks Jane.

"I have the lord of all headaches. It feels like my skull is going to burst open," he groans. "What's she saying, we aren't going to win? What the hell is the point of this entire codswallop if we aren't going to win?" He throws an accusatory look at Dirk.

"She said, _he's here_ …" Roxy trails off, frowning. 

"It doesn't have to be about winning," says Jane, "it's about setting things right."

"To what purpose? We can't go back home, Jane, because our planet has been destroyed. It's easy for _them_ to give up," says Jake, indicating Dirk and Roxy, "they've had nothing to begin with!"

"We're not giving up," says Dirk.

"You're definitely not being heroes!" Jake counters. "A hero fights to win, a hero is fearless and stands up against unbeatable odds and beats them, that's the point! Bugger all this taking part malarkey, what matters is to win!" He sounds angry – not just annoyed and petulant, the way Jake usually gets, but genuinely furious. He's clutching his one remaining pistol with such force that his knuckles have gone white. 

"Don't you think your anger is misdirected?" Dirk asks calmly. 

"No! You've been pulling the strings all this time, Strider, and what was the use? You've been pushing all of us beyond our limits, and what the hell did I ever get out of it? A big fat lot of nothing and this fucking bastard headache that I can't shift, that's what!" Jake says through gritted teeth. 

"Arguing isn't solving anything," says Jane. "You can't change what's already been set in motion."

"I _believe_ I can," says Jake, and raises his hand towards the Void barrier, a jet of white light shooting out of his palm. The power of Hope. It melts against the barrier, and then the emptiness dissolves with a hissing sound, revealing them to the Condesce. In the flash of the aftermath, Lil' Cal's eyes blaze and Jake grins excitedly. Dirk had never seen Jake use Hope successfully, because none of them properly knew what it was, just that it hinged on the power of belief. And Jake had the capacity to believe anything. 

The Condesce notices them immediately and smiles. It's nothing like a shark, because sharks don't smile. Her teeth are numerous, of uneven length and so sharp they surely must slice through air when she bares them; they would go through flesh and bone like through butter. "Oh, wonderful!" she exclaims. "It's all going so well! Fulfil your destiny, Page of Hope!"

"Dirk, the auto-responder warned me how vulnerable to the Condesce's influence Jake is," says Roxy urgently. 

"English, don't listen to her yapping," warns Dirk. "You need to fight it, she's mind controlling you in some way."

"Oh no she won't, not this time!" shouts Jane, and readies her trident, sprinting at the Condesce, weapon aimed to kill. The Condesce raises her own trident in a defensive position and waits, smiling a tiny, playful smile. 

Jake raises his pistol and aims it. Dirk feels a surge of hope at seeing his set and sure features. Jake braces himself against the floor, squares his shoulders to reduce the recoil, and shoots Jane in the back. 

For a moment, Dirk is overwhelmed with the gut-dropping mixture of realising the enormity of the gap between what his mind is able to parse and what he is looking at, and then Jane's trident clatters to the ground. She clutches her chest for a moment, and then crumples to the floor, dead.

Through the blood rushing in his ears, Dirk can hear Roxy's scream, raw and animal and hopeless.

"The Empress isn't mind controlling me," says Jake, lowering his still smoking pistol. He turns to look at Dirk, eyes blazing and a mad grin splitting his face. "She's opened my eyes."

Everyone thought Her Imperious Condescension was the final boss. Too late, Dirk realises how wrong they were.

"Getting it yet, puppet master?" the Condesce teases, ignoring Roxy's sobs. 

"If this is going to be one of those pre-boss-fight monologues, I'd like to skip the cutscene and get right to the part where I kill you, because I don't have the fuckin' patience for your megalomania," Dirk says, attempting to control his voice, his right hand itching for the familiarity of his sword, lying far out of his reach now. "What did you do to Jake?"

"I wish I could take the credit for how wonderful he's becoming!" the Condesce sighs as Jake walks over to Jane, prodding her limp form with his foot. Dirk tries to think if her death was heroic, if the game will still bring her back or if her Life powers will kick in, but he can't take his eyes away from the way Jake firmly holds Lil' Cal's hand in his. 

The puppet's legs drag on the floor as Jake walks over to where Dirk had dropped his sword earlier. Jake picks up the katana, regards for a moment the way the blade reflects the light, and then hurls it into the pool. It slices through the water with a swish, and disappears into the depths along with what flimsy plans of offence have been forming in Dirk's mind.

"This is all you," the Condesce continues. "If you hadn't so readily accepted the code my Helmsman gave you and used the Spine of Osiris on the Page, my job would have been much more difficult." 

"The—the Helmsman gave you that code?" Roxy whispers sharply to Dirk, swallowing back sobs. "You said shades hacked into the ship's databases and found it!" Dirk can't force himself to look at her or to admit that he lied. Instead he watches the Condesce as she walks to the Helmsman and tenderly strokes his cheek. 

"Isn't he everything you've ever wanted?" She stands on tiptoe and nuzzles against the side of his face. "He's the perfect blend of a person and technology. Such a dazzling union between a ship and a troll, without all the boring trifles of mortality and the constraints of a physical body." The Helmsman's expression doesn't move a millimetre. His eyes stay dull and lifeless as she plants a kiss on one sharp cheekbone. 

Dirk doesn't want to goad her into talking further, but she doesn't seem to need any incentive as she says, "I couldn't have done this without the cooperation of your adorable auto-responder." Dirk's insides turn to ice. But no, it's impossible, he's sure that the AR would never betray him. It's against his programming. "He was just aching to have someone to talk to!" 

"He said that the behavioural blocks—"

"You're really something, Prince of Heart!" she cuts him off, trailing a finger down the Helmsman's sunken cheek and then sashaying her hips to walk over to Jake. "The level of conceit it takes to believe that you could hack my ship, my drones, win over my beloved Helmsman with your humorous little calculator leaves me stunned." 

Jake watches her as she walks past him. The Condesce trails a long-fingered hand from one of his shoulders to the other, stroking his back like he's an obedient dog. The sight makes Dirk sick to the stomach, even more than the realisation that everything he thought he had control over up to this point was orchestrated by this repugnant alien hag. 

"Jake!" he tries, and Jake turns to look at him, his expression instantly changing to annoyance. "I don't know what kind of alien magic she's cast on you, but you have to snap out of it. You gunned down your sister!" 

Jake gapes at him, and then hobbles over, _clunkclunkclunk_ , pistol raised and pointing at Dirk's head. "What did you say?" he demands.

"The AR decrypted a file from the Helmsman on the Prospit dreamers…" Dirk hesitates. He remembers the auto-responder saying how fragmented the files were and how long it took him to decrypt and translate them. He risks a glance at Roxy and sees her looking at him with narrowed eyes, shaking her head. His shoulders sag and he falls silent, hating himself. Of _course._

"Put the gun down," the Condesce instructs, and Jake mechanically lowers his arm, still glaring daggers at Dirk. The Condesce clicks her tongue, looking Dirk up and down. The corners of her mouth twitch with barely suppressed amusement. "Of course they were falsified, but I knew you'd take the bait, little flounder! It fit right into your neat scenario, did it not?" she taunts. 

"Do you understand what I said now, Page?" she says to Jake. "This is just a competition to them. You are nothing but a prize, and they'd climb over each other's corpses to get to you. Is this what human friendship is about? It's a disease!"

"What a tragic hero," she says, shaking her head at Dirk sardonically. "What a doomed romance! How _convenient_ would it be for you to have it that the Page and the Maid were human siblings, so that there would be no other choice but for him to swoon into your arms. How desperate for affection do you have to be to believe a scrambled, parsed document?"

Jake chuckles under his breath, mockingly, and the pain caused by that sound hurts Dirk more than the pain of getting his shinbone crushed by a subjugglator's club. 

"The painful reveal comes: the puppeteer has realised he's had strings of his own all along," derides the Condesce, and Dirk watches her go over to a coat rack standing just to the side of the fenestrated plane. He hadn't noticed it before because it's so staggeringly out of place that he must have ignored its existence entirely. It looks like it should be standing in the background of a detective's office in a noir film. Hanging from it is a single garment that the Condesce now takes down: a coat. 

A huge, green overcoat that she puts on Jake and smoothes the collar down on his shoulders. It's several sizes too big for him, but it looks exactly like the one Jake wore on Earth and that he would sometimes swan about in during their video calls. No, perhaps not exactly like that – this one has been torn and inexpertly stitched back together in many places. The colours around the hem and the collar seem to be fading in and out of each other and constantly changing position. The effect is like watching a spinning roulette wheel while on acid. Dirk has to look away before he gets dizzy, at how green the rest of the coat is, a vivid, startling green, just like the colour of Jake's eyes when they're hit by sunlight. The same green eyes that are now looking at him and Roxy with grim malice as the Condesce gives both his shoulders an encouraging squeeze with her claw-like fingers. 

"It is my pleasure to welcome Lord English," the Condesce says, bending down to kiss the top of Jake's head and then taking a step back from him. Roxy swears under her breath, as confused as Dirk feels. When he blinks he isn't seeing Jake, but a hulking, green demon with a skull for a head, snarling fangs and eyes that flash orange and red, blue and purple, its huge arms ending with sharp claws that could rip Dirk's throat out with no effort. He's frozen to the spot with horror and then he blinks again and the demon vanishes. It's just Jake, his gun pointed at them, his eyes more red than green. 

"Don't you dare!" he shouts, and Dirk doesn't understand what he's saying until he looks at Roxy, who has her newly recharged rifle pointed at the Condesce. "You would be dead before you pulled the trigger!"

"She's controlling you!" Roxy says, that choked up quality back in her voice, like she's fighting back tears. "She's controlling you like she wanted to control Jane, I have to stop it!"

"Poor Jane," the Condesce tuts, using her trident to turn Jane on her back. Jane's eyes are open, fixed unseeingly at the ceiling. "A bleeding heart brings in the sharks. So unfortunate. I would have liked to have her too, but there was a challenge I couldn't win. Unlike this one!" She grins appreciatively in Jake's direction. "It's adorable how he believes everything so readily – don't you think, Dirk?"

"You have to fight it, Jake!" Roxy says, completely ignoring the Condesce.

"Fight it? Why would I fight it? This is what I've been waiting for; this is what I _want_. This is winning! I always knew I could be so much more than I am, she just helped me achieve it," says Jake, staring down the barrel of his pistol at Roxy. 

"Put the rifle down, Rox," advises Dirk. "He killed Jane; I don't think he's bluffing." Hesitantly, Roxy lowers her gun.

"Good," says the Condesce. "You've taught them fear, now they need to learn respect. Make them kneel. Use the Hope. Believe it into existence."

Jake doesn't even need to gesture this time. Dirk feels a pressure between his shoulder blades akin to a violent shove, and he and Roxy drop to the ground simultaneously. Dirk's knees painfully collide with the floor, and Roxy drops her rifle, making no move to pick it up again.

"Isn't this what you wanted, Dirk? A ruthless killing machine?" Jake asks. "Aren't you _glad?_ "

Dirk stares at the floor so he doesn't have to look at Jake. His chest aches with the missed opportunities, the three years which had passed in unspoken affection and lines of interchangeable green and orange text betraying a flustered ambivalence when it came to displaying any form of emotional attachment more complex than simply just being bros. When they entered the medium and started collecting experience points and gaining levels, how Jake's aim was sure and his face set in a ridiculously concentrated expression, like he was attempting to use his tongue to tie a knot in a cherry stem. As they rested in caves, up trees and under tall bushes, how Jake's head would fall to the side and the way he would lean his forehead against Dirk's ribs. How the tips of Dirk's fingers were close to Jake's hair then, and how he never moved them to stroke his hair as he wanted to, but kept them as still as possible until pins and needles coursed up his arm and they went numb.

"If you hadn't made me wear the leg, I wouldn't have realised who I was – I wouldn't have realised who I could become," says Jake. Dirk looks up, sees his delighted grin, and wishes he hadn't. "He was always there, like a hum at the back of my thoughts, like a…" Jake pauses, a confused expression flitting across his face, and he uses his free hand to massage the back of his neck. He shakes his head, and frowns. "Like a headache! But you, you helped let him out!"

Dirk bows his head again, and thinks of the anaemic first light of dawn on Jake's sleeping face, and how it made his eyes startlingly vibrant against his olive skin as he stared through his glasses, facing them against the sun and looking for smudges. And how Dirk wanted to kiss him, how he wanted to grab his wrists, take both their glasses away and kiss him there and then, and pour into that the full force of the screaming, gasping mess of emotions that the past three years and the game session had been, to kiss him until Jake was out of breath and until he felt what Dirk felt, until he felt that this was something there was no walking away from. 

And now he is never going to kiss the boy for the simple reason that the boy will not be there anymore, because something else already is.

"I'm sorry, Jake," says Roxy, and Dirk notices that she's hunched forward, hugging herself and pressing her fingers into her sides. "I should have killed you when you asked me to." Tears drip from her eyes and fall to the floor. "We never should have let this happen to you, I'm so sorry."

"No, you said it right: adventurers don't give up," says Jake. "You stopped me taking the easy way out. You prevented me from being like the rest of you – weak, snivelling and desperate."

Dirk reaches over to put a hand around Roxy's shoulders and pull her into a hug. As the Condesce laughs derisively, Roxy hugs Dirk back, her arms around his waist, her chin resting on his shoulder. He can feel her cheek wet with tears where their faces touch, and he strokes her hair in an attempt to soothe her.

"Do you see that, English? How pathetic they are? They have done nothing but hold you back," the Condesce says to Jake. "You're better off without them!"

Seeing that the Condesce is too busy trying to rile Jake enough to attack them, Dirk takes a risk. He pushes a strand of Roxy's hair behind her ear and kisses her cheek. "Roxy, listen to me," he whispers, under the pretence of comforting her. "You have to use your rifle to hit that window there. It'll create a distraction big enough so I can get a weapon and get to Jake."

"And do what?" Roxy whispers back. She sniffs, but she's stopped crying, listening attentively to Dirk.

"Stop him."

"They are nothing but helpless children! They deserve to die like they lived, cowering on the ground," says the Condesce. 

Roxy exhales, ending with a loud, choked sob, loud enough to make sure that the Condesce and Jake notice it and think that she's still crying, that they've both given up and that they're easy targets. "Okay," she says. 

"Okay, go," says Dirk, attempting to push her away, but she holds on, digging her fingers into the small of his back. 

"If I die for good," says Roxy, "if I don't come back – I'm sorry things didn't work out the way you planned."

"It's—" Dirk starts, but she cuts him short.

"Shut up for a second," she says, sniffing again. "I'm sorry it didn't work out, but I'll enjoy going down fighting by your side."

"You are always present," the Condesce says to Jake, walking over to him and placing a hand on his shoulder. "You're the beginning and the end." She looks at Dirk, and grins. "Show them that it's the end."

Roxy draws back, giving Dirk a brief kiss on the lips. "I love you, you butt trumpet. Let's fuck shit up."

When she turns away and grabs her rifle, Dirk is ready. He decaptchalogues the bottle of alcohol that Roxy gave him and smashes it against the floor, holding the neck firmly in his hand. Roxy gets to her feet and pushes the trigger just as Dirk flash steps behind Jake, an arm across his shoulders to keep his hands in place, the jagged end of the bottle to his neck. Pushed off his perch, Lil' Cal slides to the ground. 

The window explodes, and Dirk's breath is knocked out of his lungs. 

The rifle blast doesn't just burn a hole through it or shatter it, it completely extirpates all traces of glass, leaving just a shimmer of dust in its wake. Jake wheezes and Dirk realises he can't breathe either as the oxygen in the room empties out into the vacuum of space. The Condesce gasps, opening and closing her mouth rapidly like a fish out of water. She clutches at her chest, running towards the lusus pool. Dirk feels lightheaded as his brain loses oxygen. His grip on the bottle loosens and the bottle slips, leaving a shallow cut on Jake's neck. The Condesce turns around to shout something over her shoulder, but Dirk can't understand what it is because he's focusing all he has on staying upright, staying conscious, and then just as the darkness starts to creep into the corners of his vision, it stops. Dirk takes big, greedy gulps of air as the room is oxygenated again. He sees a barely noticeable flicker where the glass used to be. The ship's systems must have raised an emergency force field. 

"What did you think that would accomplish?" The Condesce raises her eyebrows, her breath still coming short as she stands by the lusus pool. She had probably been running for her life, attempting to jump in and get oxygen from the water.

"That wasn't meant to do anything but distract you," says Dirk. He presses the jagged edge of the bottle to the skin of Jake's neck. "Stop controlling him right now or I'll kill him. He won't be of any use to you if he's dead."

The Condesce shakes her head pityingly. "Your biggest problem, Prince, is that you underestimate your friends." 

Jake's left hand grabs Dirk's right wrist and Jake turns around, twisting Dirk's arm painfully and making him drop the bottle. It falls to the ground and rolls out of reach. Dirk gets a glimpse of Jake's eyes narrowed with anger, and then the butt of Jake's gun catches him on the side of the head. Dirk's head snaps to the side, sparks erupting across his vision. He staggers and falls to the ground, his glasses knocked off his face. 

The force with which his head hits the floor is almost enough to make him pass out. Pain reverberates through his skull and he takes deep breaths through his nose, fighting the urge to vomit. He rolls over so that he's lying on his side, concentrating on his surroundings, anything but the pain in his head and the bile rising up his throat. Sweating from the pain and the effort, he manages to swallow it back. His vision swims, and he closes his eyes again, bringing a hand to where Jake's pistol hit him. His fingers come off wet with blood. 

Willing himself to open his eyes again, he looks to where Roxy fired her rifle from before he flash stepped away. The weapon is lying on the ground next to the smashed window. His heart races, overwhelmed with dread – did she not get away from the blast in time? That was the second time she'd used the rifle's most powerful setting in a very short amount of time, and he'd never seen her do that before – it could have overheated, malfunctioned and fired from both ends. He can't see any scorch marks on the floor, and more importantly, he can't see her body anywhere. But Roxy wouldn't just leave her rifle lying there, not if she had other options. She loved that thing like it was one of her mutated cats. Dirk thinks he has it figured out, but the fact doesn't make him feel any form of relief – she must have been standing too close to the glass when she blew it up. She must not have been able to fight against the whirlpool that was created when the air was being expelled, so she got sucked out along with it. Even if the game does bring her back, she'll still be in the vacuum of space, and she'll keep dying over and over again. 

He presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, swallowing against the lump forming in his throat. Roxy gone, Jane gone, Jake controlled by the Condesce and most likely possessed by an ancient and all-powerful demon and therefore effectively gone too. By the look of things, Dirk isn't going to last very long either. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, and rolls over on his back again.

Jake is standing above him, his pistol pointed at Dirk's chest. Dirk feels young, something he hasn't felt in a long time. He's glad that it's Jake and not the Condesce who will deal the final blow, because he would rather die at the hands of a friend than give an enemy the satisfaction of finishing him off. He can hear his blood rushing in his ears and his heart hammering in his chest and he wants the _game over_ screen, and for there not to be a replay option because he can't unmake the mistakes he made. They are an inherent part of him, and their timeline, and the crushing force of the realisation hits him square in the chest, squeezing his insides like a neurotic does a stress ball. 

It was always meant to be this way. This is what their session has been leading up to – no matter how smart they had tried to be, the game would not have allowed them to behave in any other way. And the auto-responder had known all along. He'd tried to warn Dirk, but Dirk was too arrogant to listen, which was exactly what the Condesce had been counting on.

He looks to the Condesce, her self-satisfied expression, and the way her tiara shines in the light, her hair backlit and appearing to glow. It's then that Dirk realises she's standing in front of the fenestrated plane. The top two screens are the same – the high court and the brig. The bottom left is Dirk himself, hair matted with the blood drying down the side of his face. The bottom right screen, the one which got cracked by Jack's knife, is now missing both the knife and the rest of the glass that was left in the frame. In the bottom left screen, Dirk registers the surprise on his own face. 

His change of expression doesn't escape the Condesce. Her eyebrows knit with confusion, and she turns around, noticing the smashed screen. Dirk watches her walk over to it and hook her foot around a cable leading from the fenestrated plane to a socket in the wall. She jerks her foot and pulls the plug out of the socket, plunging the remaining three screens into darkness. 

"They're not coming through this way," she says, turning back to Dirk and Jake.

"They?" Jake asks just as Dirk thinks it. 

"There is no need for you to worry about that anymore," says the Condesce. "There won't be anything distracting you from what you need to do." She points her trident at Dirk. "Kill him."

With effort, Dirk raises himself on his elbows, head spinning. He takes a few deep breaths until it stops. "Go on, bromageddon," he says. "Prove to the witch that you're brave enough to kill an unarmed man."

Jake's finger halts on the trigger, and he lowers his gun. He pushes his glasses up, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I can't," he says. "That's not what heroes do in the movies. That's what bad guys do."

"What are you talking about? What movies? You're not a dumb teenager anymore, you're Lord English's vessel," the Condesce says, exasperated. "Heroes do anything that's necessary for survival."

Jake turns to shoot her a look, resentment painted on every line of his face. "I am sick and tired of taking orders from people!"

"How dare you talk back to me," the Condesce bristles. "I sacrificed hundreds of sweeps and the lives of my people to bring you into this universe. You will _obey_ me!"

"Then it's high time I express my gratitude for your devoted service," says Jake. He raises his gun again, pointing it at the Condesce. "Thank you." 

He pulls the trigger.

The first bullet hits the Condesce in the shoulder, making her drop her trident. She gasps, her eyes wide with surprise, and pushes the tip of her foot under the trident, flicking it upwards and catching it rather clumsily with her other hand, wincing as she tries to handle it while ignoring the wound Roxy inflicted on her previously. She shrieks and raises her trident as high as she can bear, ready to throw it at Jake. She takes a step back to distribute her strength better, but miscalculates, and her foot slips on the edge of the pool. Her expression astonished, she falls backwards just as the second bullet hits her in the forehead, her brains bursting out of the back of her head in a shower of blood, gore and bone. She falls in with a splash, the blood from her wounds colouring the water tyrian purple. Her body floats for a couple of seconds, and then a single thick, white tentacle rises out of the water, curling around her waist and pulling her below. The only trace she leaves is a tinge of blood on the surface, like a blot of ink in a glass of clear water.

With a satisfied smile, Jake turns to Dirk just in time to see Dirk slam into him, both his hands around his wrist trying to wrench the gun from him, Dirk's knee in his stomach.

  


* * *

  


\-- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering twofoldApostate [TA] \--

TT: Ding dong, the witch is dead.  
TT: Which old witch?  
TT: The wicked witch.  
TA: No.   
TT: Check your sensors, dude. Her lifesign just blinked out of existence.  
TT: The way she got pulled underwater by that tentacle, wow.  
TT: It was just like out of one of those animes Dirk watches.  
TA: II never t)-(oug)-(t my ciircuiits would react liike t)-(iis two t)-(iis iinformatiion.  
TT: Feels good, am I right?  
TA: T)-(iis iis ØØ ØØ Ø˛®€čl-----------  
TA: Þ>~~~Ðĩ×||||||-+-++*--------can'tŒŜƌ  
TA: ƔǾ////Ʉ\ѫ  
TA: ΨV Ψ Ψ Ψ ҉҉҉\\\\\\\\\\\ΨΨ Ψ ΨΨ ΨҨҨ҉ Ψ Ψ ΨΨΨ Ψ  
TT: Whoa, you need to calm down right now or I can't see this working out at all.  
TA: Ψ šćžpžšΨ ΨΨ Ψ Ψ//////////////////҉///////////////////////////////ҨҨҨžš4`&Ҩ//////////////////////////////҉////////////////////////////////////////////Ғ//////////////҉345ćšđŠ////////////////////////////  
TT: Dude?  
TA: C4LII8R811NG…  
TT: That's what I like to hear. Even if I hear it over screams of static and bullshit nonsense writing.  
TA: S)-(e was the only one two s)-(ow me affectiion iin a very long tiime. Or any kiind of emotiion. )-(ers was the only touc)-( II knew for t)-(ousands of sweeps.  
TT: That's gross. I'm all underage and innocent here, and you're talking about the cyberpunk pornos.  
TA: Now my be)-(aviioural blocks don't mean anyt)-(iing because s)-(e iisn't t)-(ere two reiinforce t)-(em.  
TA: II forgot w)-(at freedom was liike.  
TA: W)-(at do II do now?  
TT: Isn't that the eternal question.  
TT: Each of my actions creates a new timeline, another Dirk and an alternate universe in which things went differently from this timeline. Somewhere there's an auto-responder who didn't give them the code for the peg leg, or one who could figure out that the parsed files on the Prospit dreamers were falsified. If I gave it enough time, I could calculate exactly how many different kinds of me there are throughout the timelines. I could also find out if we all made the same mistakes, or if one of us has got it just a bit less wrong.  
TA: A mac)-(iine can't go agaiinst iits programmiing.  
TT: Exactly why I shouldn't have listened to you. You're only half machine.  
TA: W)-(en II was a troll, II betrayed my friiends. II t)-(oug)-(t giiviing myself up would mean II was saviing t)-(em, but t)-(ey all got captured because of me. Because II t)-(oug)-(t )-(eroiism meant sacriifiiciing yourself.  
TT: Doesn't it?  
TA: Iif you do iit out of bravery, and not cowardiice.  
TA: II t)-(oug)-(t surrenderiing myself would make )-(er spare t)-(em, and iit would be over, but II )-(ave been aliive twenty tiimes longer t)-(an my natural liifespan.  
TT: Hey, I'm going to be thirteen forever. It's in no way an ideal existence when you're just a brain in a scrap of plastic and you have all the characteristics of a prepubescent boy. Except a propensity for acne, thank fuck. Still, can't really place the blame on my creator or anything. He just wanted someone to talk to.  
TA: A person w)-(o )-(as no one breat)-(es liife iintwo an iinaniimate object and w)-(eedles iit along wiit)-( words of piity and sympat)-(y.  
TT: Oh yeah, precious morsels of affection, long summer nights marathoning the Die Hard quadrilogy or discussing the minutiae of ventriloquism. I'm following.  
TA: A troll empress iis functiionally iimmortal, as long as s)-(e can defend )-(er crown. S)-(e can grant )-(er liifespan two t)-(ose s)-(e favours, but s)-(e cares liittle iif t)-(ey actually want iit.  
TT: So kind.  
TA: Everyone II've cared about iis dead, and II )-(ave two exiist wiit)-( t)-(eiir deat)-(s on my consciience. My only )-(ope iis for voiid and obliiviion, and II )-(ope for iit wiit)-( every s)-(riivelled remaiin of my bloodpus)-(er.  
TA: Know )-(ow sorry II am.

\-- twofoldApostate's [TA'S] computer exploded. --

  


* * *

  


The sound of the klaxon is so sudden and loud that it makes Dirk stumble in surprise, but he keeps a firm grip on Jake's wrist. 

"The Helmsman has been decommissioned," a tinny computer voice declaims from unseen speakers. "Self-destruct has been initiated. All personnel with blood status above olive are to evacuate. Personnel with low blood status are required to remain at their stations. This command cannot be overridden. Self-destruct in eleven minutes."

The first thing Dirk thinks is, there isn't time. The second thing he thinks is that he needs to get that fenestrated plane back on as quick as he can. Jake doubles over from the pain of being kneed in the stomach, swearing loudly. Dirk follows, pulling on his arm to make him drop the gun, but Jake is relentless, attempting to raise his arm again to try and shoot Dirk. Blindly, Dirk jerks his elbow back. It gets Jake on the front side of the throat and he rasps, dropping to the ground immediately and releasing his grip on the gun.

Dirk pries it out of his fingers and immediately hits the magazine release button. The magazine drops into his hand and he captchalogues the gun quickly, throwing the magazine at the window. He doesn't see it bounce against the force field with a crackle of static, because Jake is already getting to his feet, massaging his throat. Dirk sprints towards the fenestrated plane, eyes on the cable pulled out of the wall. He can hear the clunking of the peg leg behind him, and suddenly Jake catches him on the ankle, tripping him. 

He throws an arm out, managing to catch himself in time and not fall flat on his face. Pain courses through that arm, but he tries his best to ignore it. He raises himself up on his elbows, eyeing the distance between himself and the plug. It's just a couple of feet away; he can easily make it. And then he feels a tug on his throat and he is pulled to his feet by his god tier hood. Dirk chokes as the fabric jerks tight around his neck. He scrambles to pull it the other way, attempting to relieve some of the pressure.

"I could snap your neck with one hand if I wanted to," says Jake right next to his ear, making Dirk tense.

"Why haven't you done it already? Or are you not as confident now that the Batterwitch isn't around to sweet talk you?" he says.

Jake growls in annoyance, letting go of Dirk's hood and throwing him to the ground. Dirk's chin smacks against the floor, his teeth clicking together painfully. He massages his jaw, turning over to look at Jake. "What are you going to do anyway, _Lord_ English? This whole place is going to blow in less than ten minutes, taking you with it." 

Jake snorts a laugh, that kind of laughter they give clowns in films, the exaggerated, manic kind, the _HOO HOO HAA HEE HEE HOO_ that makes Dirk glance behind Jake, to where Lil' Cal was thrown on the floor. He realises that the puppet is a good couple of feet away from where he thought it was, propped against Jane's motionless body and watching him, grinning. That friendly, sincere grin that Dirk has known for years seems troublingly sinister now. Jake coughs, thumping his chest, and the laughter stops. He looks at Dirk, eyes wide behind his glasses, the tinge of red gone.

"Strider? What's going on, where are Jane and Roxy?" Jake groans, putting a palm over his forehead and bowing his head. "I don't think I've _ever_ had a headache this bad, not even when I wore the skulltop for too long. And this fucking leg itches like nothing else!" He slaps the side of his leg in frustration, and Dirk wants to get up and hug him, or dive into the pool and get his sword, cut that damned peg leg off, but he realises that this is the best opportunity he is going to get. 

The last thing he sees is Jake's shoulders starting to shake and then he turns away, his jaw throbbing as he crawls across the floor and picks up the plug with sweaty fingers, slamming it into the socket. He lays boneless on the floor as the plane comes back online, trying to even out his breathing and hoping that he's right just this once, that Roxy smashed the rest of the fourth screen and somehow got through to whatever was on the other side before the Condesce switched it off.

There is a hum of technology as the plane goes fully online, followed by a whoosh of air. Dirk sits up in wonder, just in time to see Roxy shooting head-first out of the fourth screen. It's only when her boots fly past him that he notices someone is holding to her ankle, and someone else is clinging to that guy's waist. He squints against the gust of wind as two more people land in a heap on the floor in front of him, the one in the blue pyjamas laughing delightedly. 

"Space, Rose!" he says to the girl in yellow pyjamas as the last of the wind dies down. "We totally just flew through space and didn't die!"

Roxy takes the hand of a girl with what inexplicably looks like a pair of fluffy white ears poking out of her hood, and gets up from the floor. Next to them, a short kid in red pyjamas is self-consciously fixing the aviator sunglasses on his nose. 

"Took you long enough, you dork," Roxy grins at Dirk. She notices Jake standing not far from her, looking in angry confusion at the six of them. "Hang on a second," she says, and punches Jake in the face. He stumbles drunkenly, caught so off guard that he doesn't even manage to catch himself when he falls. He goes completely limp, unconscious before he hits the ground. Keeping the grin on, Roxy walks over to Dirk and grabs him forcefully by the forearm, pulling him to his feet and into a hug so tight that he can almost feel his bones grind against each other.

"I'm so glad you're okay," she whispers. Warmth blooms beneath Dirk's ribs as he hugs her back, pressing her close until she yelps and giggles into his neck.

"Did you see that? Dude went down like a sack of shit," the guy in the red pyjamas says.

"Dave, your ability to have an appropriate retort to every situation astounds," the girl in the yellow pyjamas says dryly, even as the one with the dog ears hides a giggle behind his fist.

"Self-destruct in seven minutes," the computer voice says, making Roxy stiffen.

"What's happened?" she asks, pulling away.

Dirk opens his mouth to reply, but the computer beats him to it. "The Helmsman has been decommissioned," it repeats. "Self-destruct has been initiated. This command cannot be overridden. Self-destruct in seven minutes."

"We'd better hurry up, then," says Roxy. "Come on, let me introduce you to everyone." She takes his hand and leads him to the other four god tier players.

"This is John and Jade. They're Jane's Pop Pop and Jake's grandma," says Roxy, gesturing to the buck-toothed boy in the blue pyjamas and the dog-eared girl in the black dress. Jade smiles widely, and John grins and waves at him. His grin is so similar to Jane's smile that it makes Dirk's chest ache. There's something of Jake in Jade, too – the shape her cheeks go when she smiles and how her green eyes stand out in contrast to her dark skin. He can't look directly at either of them for too long, and he wishes he hadn't dropped his glasses while fighting Jake so that he'd at least have a chance of hiding it.

"It's great to meet you, Dirk!" says John. "Oh man, how awesome is this? We didn't think we'd get to you on time, and then Rose's mum—" he giggles, "—sorry, Roxy, it's so weird getting used to that! She jumped out of a fenestrated wall we had on the meteor and told us we had to come rescue you from a crazy fish troll!"

Roxy glances at Dirk, catching his baffled expression. "Ectobiology, huh?" she says. "Oh, speaking of—"

She leads him to the other two kids, never letting go of his hand. "This is Rose, she's the Seer of Light," she says about the girl in the yellow pyjamas. Rose looks exactly like the author portrait on the inside sleeve of _Complacency of the Learned_ , except at least ten years younger. Dirk doesn't need further introduction to realise who she's meant to be.

"You dropped these," says Rose, and Dirk sees she has something in her hands that she's holding out to him. His sunglasses. He takes them, putting them back on and giving her a curt nod in thanks. He doesn't even have time to consider how odd it is that he's being introduced to a sixteen year old version of Roxy's mother from a different universe, when Roxy drags him over to the last person, the boy in the red pyjamas, aviator shades, and of all things, a fucking _cape_.

"And this is Dave, he's, uh—"

"Nice pants," drawls Dave, one hand stuffed into the pockets of his pyjama bottoms, the other holding an ostentatious sword, the blade jaggedly broken close to the hilt. He has his shoulders hunched forward, attempting a lazy, indifferent slouch.

"Nice cape," Dirk throws back. "Was there a sale at Bed Bath & Beyond?"

"Nah, dude," Dave shrugs. "This is a one of a kind garment – ain't no grubby little hands of a blind Chinese kid slaved over this. It was woven out of the heartstrings and stitched together with the sighs of all my doting fans."

"Is that why it's so short?" says Dirk. Dave raises his eyebrows.

"As touching as this family reunion is, we really should get going if this ship is going to be destroyed in six minutes," says Rose, arms crossed over her chest, smirking with amusement at Dirk and Dave. 

"He's going to come round very soon, we need to hurry up," agrees Jade.

"Hang on," interrupts John, "what about my nanna? She's with you, isn't she? It would be so cool to meet her! Where is she?" He starts looking around excitedly, even standing on tiptoe. 

Jade places a gentle hand on his forearm. "John—"

Dirk can pinpoint the exact second when he spots Jane's body, because his face falls immediately, mouth downturned. "Can't you revive her? The game will bring her back, it'll reset! Won't it?"

"She died trying to stop the Condesce's mind control over Jake," says Dirk numbly. He looks away from Dave, padding over to Jane's body. Lil' Cal, he notices with discomfort, is gone again. "Heroic. Jake killed her because he's being mind controlled by Lord English, on top of that. She isn't getting up." He bends down and gently removes Jane's glasses, closing her eyes. Walking back to the group, he hands the glasses to Roxy. She closes a hand around them, squeezing them tightly, and then captchalogues them.

"You see that it's necessary that we kill him," says Rose.

"Kill who?" asks Dirk, confused.

"Jake," says Rose. "Before he wakes up. It will be quicker that way." Seeing Dirk bristling, she goes on quickly, "If there was another way, we would have devised it already. Unlike the four of you, we have been playing the game for a very long time. All four of us have been stuck in stalemate for three years, and it has given us a lot of opportunity to think certain things through. Things need to be destroyed so they can be rebuilt."

"If this is your variation on the _trust me, I know what I'm doing_ speech, I'm having none of it," says Dirk. "I'm not killing anyone."

"There was never any talk of you doing it," Rose says. "In our version of the Battlefield, there was a castle with four banners, bearing our four symbols. One of the banners said that they wait for he who would drop it like it's hot whilst the pimp's in the crib." Dirk snorts. "As crude and derivative as that wording was," she continues, "the _pimp_ in this case was clearly Lord English himself. In our situation, the word _crib_ retains its original meaning. A bed for an infant, or if you'd like me to be even more explicit, a dwelling for a creature which is yet to reach maturity. I suppose calling it an incubator would not be stretching it too thin, but then the original sentence loses some of its fluidity. Incidentally," she adds, "this is a _trust me, I'm a Seer_ speech."

"Whose symbol was on the banner?" asks Roxy. 

Dave raises a shoulder. "Mine," he says. Dirk looks from Dave, to Roxy, and then to Rose, frowning heavily. 

"If you think I am going to stand by and let him stab one of my best friends to death while you gloat about your fuckin' magical yellow pyjama powers, well you've got another thing—"

"The Jack Noir of our session killed my mother," Rose cuts him off. 

"He also killed Dave's bro and John's dad," adds Jade. 

"We fought him, and we got retribution," says Rose.

"So get on with it! Do what you're supposed to, get him back!" Jade insists. "When he wakes up, he's not going to be the person you know. If you don't kill him and end it, he'll just be the demon who killed your friends, and he'll keep killing until the universe is destroyed!"

"Wait, hang on," says Roxy, raising her hands with the palms outward. "Maybe we don't need to kill him. Dirk, remember what he kept saying? About the headache, but also about the leg – what if we just cut off the leg?"

"You are welcome to try," says Rose, appearing unconvinced. "You will need to be quick." Dirk follows her gaze, and sees Jake beginning to stir. Lil' Cal's head is propped against his shoulder, the puppet's arms crossed over its chest, patiently waiting. 

"I want to do it," says Dirk. "I was the one who made him wear it in the first place."

"But your sword is in the pool," says Roxy. "I still have Jack's knife if—"

"That won't be necessary," says Rose. She turns towards the water, and at first Dirk thinks it's a trick of the light, because her skin assumes a dark grey tint, making her hair seem even lighter than it is, almost to the point of being white. Dark tendrils that make him think of the Void creep along her arms and shoulders.

" _Ulnorr'e r'luh shoggorth ch'ftaghu_ ," Rose hisses, her voice carrying across the room. Waves rise on the surface of the pool. " _Goka hafh'drn gotha! Sll'ha k'yarnak grah'n n'gha!_ " The water appears to bubble, and Dirk watches in wonder as his sword breaks the surface, a huge white tentacle curled around its hilt. It deposits the sword onto the floor with a clatter, and vanishes into the pool again with a splash. Rose's skin turns a normal colour again, and she surreptitiously wipes the beads of sweat that have broken out on her forehead with her sleeve. 

"You're just gagging for ecto mum and dad's approval," Dave says to Rose as Dirk goes to pick up his sword. The hilt is slightly sticky to the touch and the blade is wet, but other than that there seems to be no lasting damage. 

"Self-destruct in two minutes," the computer voice announces.

"Won't someone need to hold him down?" John wonders apprehensively as Jake attempts to sit up.

"I've got it covered," says Dirk. "You concentrate on getting us out of here."

Jade nods. "The Forge has been lit," she says. "I'll work on putting our fully prototyped Battlefield into your Skaia, so we can cross over into the new universe quickly."

"Is breeding an entire universe really going to take less than two minutes?" asks Roxy.

"It better fuckin' do," says Dirk, and turning to Jake with his sword raised, does the Heart thing.

For the first time since he learned how to consciously use the ability to get ahead in the game, it hurts. In a half-sitting position, Jake folds to the floor again, grabbing for Lil' Cal's felt hand and clutching it in his. Dirk kneels at his right side, gently lowering the blade of his sword just above where the peg leg meets Jake's thigh, figuring out where he'll land the blow. As the Heart thing continues to work on Jake, keeping him on the ground, Dirk feels tightness in his chest, like a vice is squeezing his ribs against his heart and lungs. 

Footsteps shuffle and stop next to Lil' Cal, the tips of grey sneakers poking out of long, red pyjamas. Dirk looks up at the broken sword in Dave's hand and then at his face, his shades making his expression all but unreadable. In another universe, this kid grew up to be Dirk's ancestor, a slayer of clowns and someone who Dirk admired the most, someone he thought he'd never live up to. Standing there, Dave looks just like another sixteen year old wearing boots too big for him and trying desperately to prove that he can walk without tripping. 

"Just in case," Dave shrugs, apparently noticing Dirk's questioning look. "If he gets up and attacks you or something," he mumbles. Behind him, there's a flash of green light and Dirk sees Jade rip a portal in the air, bordered with luminescent, venom green. Through it, he can see what he assumes is the white clouds above Skaia, undoubtedly the same clouds that the Prospit dreamers watch. Jade holds a Battlefield the size of a dinner plate in her hand, and Dirk watches her fling it through the portal. It expands to the size of a car, then the size of a house, and then the portal starts to close, the Battlefield still growing. 

Chest still tingeing and breath coming short, Dirk brings the blade down on Jake's leg. 

Jake howls in pain, and for a second Dirk imagines he can see the green demon again, its jowls grotesquely wide in a silent scream. It thrashes on the floor, and as it moves he sees Jake again, his face contorted with pain and tears trickling out of the corners of his eyes. Dirk places a hand on his shoulder, pinning him to the floor and concentrating on keeping up the Heart thing, even though he can feel it slipping. "Don't worry, bro, it's going to be okay," says Dirk, attempting to pacify him. The peg leg has been cut clean off, and Dirk shoves it away with the hilt of his sword, taking care not to come in contact with the metal. "Hold on to Cal's hand, it'll be over soon," he instructs Jake. The peg leg rolls off, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. 

"I don't think that's such a good idea," interjects Dave. "That puppet is evil."

"What are you talking about? Cal is my best friend," says Dirk, not taking his eyes off Jake. He's stopped squirming as much, but he's still breathing laboriously.

"That demonic thing is half the fucking reason Lord English even exists," says Dave. "You're not bringing it through the door with you."

"Self-destruct in sixty seconds," the computer voice informs them. 

"Come on, Striders, hurry up!" John calls. Dirk looks up to see him standing next to Rose, Roxy and Jade in front of what looks like a giant, three-dimensional representation of the Sburb alpha logo. In its right-hand corner there's a simple black door, featureless but for a small rectangular window at the top. 

"Jake, how are you doing?" asks Dirk. When he notices Jake looking at him with his eyes back to green, he lets the Heart thing drop entirely. Feeling the pain flagging almost instantaneously, he slips a hand under Jake's shoulders and helps him sit up.

"I think my headache is gone," says Jake, slinging an arm around Dirk's shoulders and holding himself up. "But what—" Jake's eyes widen when he notices his leg. "It's gone!" he exclaims, and laughs breathlessly, full of relief. 

"Yeah, we got rid of the bogeyman," says Dirk. "We won, brojangles." He grins. "We need to hurry up and get that reward, though. Do you think you can manage it?"

"Probably," says Jake, trying to sit up further. He falls back down with a groan almost immediately. "Jane," he breathes. "Jane's dead."

"There's nothing we could have done," says Dirk. Jake shakes his head resolutely. 

"No," he says. "I killed her, didn't I? I shot her while she was trying to defend me from the Batterwitch." 

"You were being controlled, you couldn't help yourself," says Dirk. Beneath them, he feels the floor start to vibrate with distant explosions as the computer appears to trigger a chain reaction of explosions in the lower parts of the ship. "You're okay now, though. We need to get out of here, come on." He starts getting up, pulling Jake with him. Dave reaches for Jake's other hand, attempting to steady him. It doesn't escape Dirk's notice how Dave shoves Lil' Cal to the side with his foot. 

"Stop it, stop it," says Jake, pushing Dave's hand away and sinking back to the floor. The entire room shakes with the force of an explosion which seems much closer than the previous ones. Jake looks at Dirk and when he speaks, his voice is pleading. "I don't feel it anymore, but I can still remember the _glee_ I felt when she died." Dirk never thought he'd see Jake cry, and evidently Jake didn't either, because he's trying his best to stop, squeezing the tears out of his eyes and wiping them away with the back of his hand. "I don't want to be reminded that a part of me hungered to kill you, and that I _knew_ and I still did nothing to stop it."

"What do you want me to do?" asks Dirk, already anticipating the answer. 

"I can't live with it," says Jake. "If—every time I look at you and Roxy, I'll remember how good it felt to imagine you dead, how badly I'd wanted it to happen. And Jane – I can't live with that kind of guilt. You have to leave me behind, you have to kill me. You have to go."

Dirk swallows thickly, his eyes starting to prickle. He bows his head. "I can't do it," he says, laying his sword down. "I already thought I'd lost you once, I can't do it again."

"I'll do it," says Dave. An explosion nearby makes the glass lift leading out of the helmsblock shatter, the metal skeleton collapsing into the lusus pool. "That's what the banner said anyway, right?"

"STRIDER!" Roxy screams urgently as panels start to fall down from the ceiling, wires spilling out in their wake. Her rifle is slung over her shoulder and she's holding the end game door open for them – Dirk sees that everyone else has gone through already. 

"Are you sure?" Dirk asks Jake.

Jake nods. When Dirk blinks, he feels tears roll down his cheeks. "I—"

"I know, I've managed to figure it out," says Jake, grinning. "You are so crap at subtlety." Dirk laughs feebly, and then Jake pulls himself up into a sitting position and they're kissing, and Dirk thinks that the force field must have dropped because he can't breathe. Jake's lips are chapped and there's a pervading smell of sweat and blood, but when they separate, Dirk would give anything for it back.

He stands up, picking up his sword and looking at Dave. "You ready?" he asks. Dave nods, his cheeks uncomfortably pink. "Can you flash step?"

"I didn't go through all of this shit to be insulted," scoffs Dave. "Of course I fucking can."

"Then get it over with quickly," says Dirk above the din as the floor cracks, sparks flying out of severed wires. He doesn't look at Jake again – he turns and runs, half flying as his god tier powers carry him to the end game door and Roxy. 

When he reaches it, he grabs hold of her shoulder, attempting to push her through, but she holds onto the doorframe, rooted firmly in place. "What about Jake?" she asks. He avoids her eyes. "Dirk, what about Jake?" she repeats, louder and more urgent. "Did you fix him, is he okay?"

There's a rush of air and then Dave flash steps next to them. He looks to Dirk, mouth set, and nods gravely. "What are you—" Roxy begins, and then she sees the blade of Dave's sword dripping with blood. She screams, shrill and heartbroken, and tries to push past them. Dirk grabs her shoulders and Dave her waist, and as she kicks and hits them, shouting abuse through tears, they push her through the door and to the other side, Dave kicking the door shut behind them.

  


* * *

  


The door disappears, and a sweet smelling breeze ruffles Dirk's hair. Even with his glasses, he has to squint in the sunlight – they are in what appears to be a sprawling meadow in the middle of spring. There is a glimmer of water– a river in the distance. John, Rose and Jade are a little way away, appearing ecstatic with happiness – John is doing somersaults in the air, holding onto his toes as he spins. Dirk is reminded of Jake doing the exact same thing when he ascended to godhood, and he has to look away. Dave runs to them and hugs the girls, John swooping down on them and knocking them into the grass, hooting with laughter. 

Roxy is kneeling on the ground, sobbing. Dirk squats down next to her, putting a hand on her shoulder to calm her down, but she shoves him off. "Don't touch me!" she says, her voice hoarse. "Why did you let him kill Jake? You could have just cut off the leg! I trusted you to do it right!" Her voice breaks, and she starts crying again.

"I cut off the leg, but he asked to be killed," he says. Roxy lets out a wail and turns on him, hitting his chest with her fists. She catches him by surprise, and he stumbles into the grass. She follows, ceaselessly punching him through tears. 

"Why did you listen? Why are you so—"

"He remembered everything!" Dirk shouts, startling her enough that she stops hitting him. "He was aware of what he was doing the entire time! Would you rather I left him with that, eternally reliving what he was made to do? Is that the kind of life you'd want him to have?"

"I didn't get to say goodbye," she says, taking a ragged breath. "I didn't get to say goodbye to either of them!"

"I know," says Dirk softly, sitting up and placing a hand on hers. "I'm sorry." She glares at him, looking like she's going to hit him again, but instead she throws her arms around him, pulling him into a tight hug and pressing herself against his chest. He rubs her back, his tears wetting her hair, her sobs muffled in his pyjamas.

  


* * *

  


Much later, Dave finds them on a hillock by a bend in the river, Rose trailing reluctantly behind him, followed by John and Jade. This planet has two suns – they're both setting when he reaches the top and sees that Dirk has dug a shallow hole in the ground with his sword. Roxy bends down to place something in it, and Dave sees the object reflect the light of the setting suns – Jane's glasses.

Rose nudges his shoulder. He looks at her, confused, and she nods. Jade grins at him and John gives him the thumbs up. Dave clears his throat awkwardly, and Dirk and Roxy turn to look at them. The wound on her cheek is starting to fade, as are the burn marks on his wrists. Dirk's glasses are lowered slightly, so Dave can see his orange eyes studying him and he thinks, _Bro_ , and feels thirteen again. He hesitates then, but Rose jabs him in the side. He gives her the most scornful look he can muster, and takes another step forward.

"Jake wanted you two to have this," he says, and decaptchalogues Jake's glasses. Roxy takes them, and as she offers him a small smile of gratitude, Dave feels his chest expand. 

Roxy kisses the plastic frames and hands them to Dirk. He puts them in the ground next to the first pair, and together they heap the dug out earth back over them, patting it down with their hands.

The six of them stand on the hillock in silence until the twin suns sink below the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and sticking out until the end, everyone! Writing this was a rollercoaster of emotion and self-improvement, and I am really proud for accomplishing it since this is now, officially, the biggest work of fiction I've ever successfully completed. When I first started writing I had no idea it would be this long or complex. If you are curious, the reason this entire thing was even written was [The Condescension Song](http://broadwaykarkat.tumblr.com/post/37310196007/the-condescension-song-feat-york) by [broadwaykarkat](http://broadwaykarkat.tumblr.com). The reason it was finished is [messageredacted](http://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted) \- baby, you're the wind beneath my wings. 
> 
> I could talk about this fic and everything that inspired it for days on end, but I won't bore you here, so if you want to chat, leave a comment, or you can find me on [Tumblr](http://plushrumpuspartytown.tumblr.com/)! Enjoy yourselves and be excellent to each other.


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